A new peer-reviewed study led by researchers at Brown University in partnership with the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management revealed that diamondback terrapins (Malaclemys terrapin), iconic turtles of America’s salt marshes, face heightened risks at the northern edge of their range in New England.

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 critical problem is that our strategies to identify and track wildlife parasites originated to combat livestock diseases a century ago. We know very little about how to answer the question: What parasites infect tropical wildlife? We know far more about the subset of parasites that harm humans and livestock than all others. Consequently, our conservation 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 in the field of Molecular Parasitology 🏆

A new paper from the Kartzinel Lab is the first to compare the parasites of wild two- and three-toed sloths living in both primary forests and urban habitats. Led by Ezequiel Vanderhoeven, the paper Host specificity of gastrointestinal parasites in free-ranging sloths from Costa Rica was published in partnership with our friends at Sloth Conservation Foundation.

The upshot: The gerbils that are the best jumpers are not necessarily the best maneuverers, and vice versa. Led by Courtney Reed, the Kartzinel Lab ran a series of controlled laboratory tests to discover that each individual's decision in the pivotal moment it meets a predator may be enabled by -- or constrained by -- the anatomy of its hind limbs. The paper Distinct morphological drivers of jumping and maneuvering performance in gerbils was published in Journal of Experimental Biology!

Congratulations to Bianca Brown, microbiome scientist extraordinaire, on her publication appearing today in Ecosphere! Spatiotemporal variation in the gut microbiomes of co-occurring wild rodent species is freely available via open access. It is a rare example of the type of insightful work that can develop through collaborations involving field, lab, and big-data analytical approaches to really understand what's going on with wildlife. It is part of our long-term collaboration with the UHURU project at Mpala Research Centre in Kenya.

The paper led by Brian Gill on individual-level tracking of elephant diets -- Foraging History of Individual Elephants Using DNA Metabarcoding -- was just published by Royal Society Open Science. We are very proud of this paper, which revisits a set of classic studies on seasonal diet switching by elephants using stable isotopes in hair that were led by coauthors Thure Cerling and George Wittemeyer. The work was made possible with support in the field from Save the Elephants and with the botanical expertise of coauthor Paul Musili from the National Museums of Kenya.

The paper was accompanied by a great summary by Corrie Pikul and featured on the Brown University homepage: Similar to Humans, Elephants Vary What they Eat for Dinner. 

The paper also attracted attention in the media, including interviews on BBC Television and Times Radio. Some nice coverage of the study was also provided by BBC (with hilarious photos), Newsweek, ZME Science, and The Times. 

Led by Bethan Littleford-Colquhoun, the Kartzinel Lab published a paper describes our efforts to repurpose CRISPR technology in ways that might help overcome persistent drawbacks to PCR and other targeted enrichment strategies in molecular ecology. This post provides a summary of the strategy we used and the lessons we learned in publishing A CRISPR-based strategy for targeted sequencing in biodiversity science at Molecular Ecology Resources. The article was originally posted as a BioRxiv preprint.

An exciting paper from the lab on lizard behavior, let by (former) undergraduate all-star Thomas Patti, has been published in Biological Journal of the Linnean Society. The "Bite and Seek" paper focuses on the exploratory behaviors and bite force of the Podarcis lizard colony that we had on campus. Thomas and the team tested an extensive series of hypotheses about the relationship between behaviors observed in populations of this non-native lizard species and the recency of population establishment. All else equal, propensity for exploration might be expected to facilitate the establishment of new populations -- lizards have to explore at least a little to get somewhere new -- and thus recently founded populations should comprise groups of explorers. Not so in nature, Thomas reports, and this requires us to take a more nuanced view of behavioral 'syndromes' as sets of traits and behaviors that may be associated with invasion potential and success in non-native species. Great work Thomas, Colin, Andy, and Caroline!

Robert Ang'ila published Fine-scale variation in soil and topography influences herbaceous vegetation and the distribution of large mammalian herbivores based on his Masters research in African Journal of Ecology! Robert's paper reports on spatial associations between the abundance and diversity of wildlife and understory plant communities across the massive CTFS-ForestGEO plot at Mpala Research Centre in Kenya. The work highlights how fine-scale variation in soil and topography can shape plant-herbivore interaction networks that play out over much broader scales. Great work, Robert!

Bianca Brown published a paper entitled Host phylogeny and functional traits differentiate gut microbiomes in a diverse natural community of small mammals in Molecular Ecology. This paper was the result of a major collaborative effort that benefited from Bianca's insight, creativity, and leadership. This post summarizes the paper that emerged from the Kartzinel Lab's long-term research on food webs in African savannas.

There is a fascinating population of Italian Wall Lizards living in Boston's Fenway Gardens. Even during the height of the pandemic, members of the Lizard Team were able to do some fieldwork observing and tracking the lizard population at this novel site for the species. In the first of several publications the team is leading from this time, we recently published a Natural History Note in Herpetological Review describing a couple of instances of avian predation observed: a hawk and a grackle separately preyed on individuals from this population. The population has only been around for a short number of years, and there are no native lizards in this region, so this represented novel predatory behaviors on a no-analog lizard population in the region. Scroll to page 500 of this Issue of Herpetological Review for some interesting observation and incredible photos published! 

Led by Bethan Littleford-Colquhoun, the Kartzinel Lab published a strong, thoughtful, and evidence-based reply to an earlier comment in Molecular Ecology: Evidence-based strategies to navigate the complexity of dietary DNA.

The take-home: there are a lot of challenges and opportunities when it comes to using dietary DNA metabarcoding strategies to advance a variety of important research agendas; Beth is leading the way when it comes to clear-thinking about how we conduct our studies and how we can strengthen the evidence we use to support our conclusions.
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