Are the Culex pipiens biotypes pipiens, molestus and their hybrids competent vectors of avian Plasmodium?

The common house mosquito Culex pipiens s.l., widely distributed in Europe, Africa, and North America has two recognized biotypes, Cx.

Modelling the spatial risk of malaria through probability distribution of s.l. and imported cases.

Malaria remains one of the most important infectious diseases globally due to its high incidence and mortality rates. The influx of infected cases from endemic to non-endemic malaria regions like Europe has resulted in a public health concern over sporadic local outbreaks. This is facilitated by the continued presence of competent vectors in non-endemic countries.

Blood lead levels in an endangered vulture decline following changes in hunting activity.

Lead ammunition stands out as one of the most pervasive pollutants affecting wildlife. Its impact on bird populations have spurred efforts for the phase-out of leaded gunshot in several countries, although with varying scopes and applications. Ongoing and future policy changes require data to assess the effectiveness of adopted measures, particularly in the current context of biodiversity loss.

A new trophic specialization buffers a top predator against climate-driven resource instability.

Intraspecific phenotypic variability is key to respond to environmental changes and anomalies. However, documenting the emergence of behavioral diversification in natural populations has remained elusive due to the difficulty of observing such a phenomenon at the right time and place. Here, we investigated how the emergence of a new trophic strategy in a population subjected to high fluctuations in the availability of its main trophic resource (migrating songbirds) affected the breeding performance, population structure, and population fitness of a specialized color polymorphic predator, the Eleonora's falcon from the Canary Islands.

Insularity determines nestling sex ratio variation in Egyptian vulture populations.

Variation in offspring sex ratio, particularly in birds, has been frequently studied over the last century, although seldom using long-term monitoring data. In raptors, the cost of raising males and females is not equal, and several variables have been found to have significant effects on sex ratio, including food availability, parental age, and hatching order. Sex ratio differences between island populations and their mainland counterparts have been poorly documented, despite broad scientific literature on the island syndrome reporting substantial differences in population demography and ecology.

A systematic review of environmental factors related to WNV circulation in European and Mediterranean countries.

Introduction/objective: West Nile virus (WNV) is one of the most widely distributed flaviviruses worldwide. It is considered an endemic and emerging pathogen in different areas of the Europe and Mediterranean countries (MR). Mosquitoes of the genus spp.

The interplay of wind and uplift facilitates over-water flight in facultative soaring birds.

Flying over the open sea is energetically costly for terrestrial birds. Despite this, over-water journeys of many birds, sometimes hundreds of kilometres long, are uncovered by bio-logging technology. To understand how these birds afford their flights over the open sea, we investigated the role of atmospheric conditions, specifically wind and uplift, in subsidizing over-water flight at a global scale.

Adaptive drift and barrier-avoidance by a fly-forage migrant along a climate-driven flyway.

Background: Route choice and travel performance of fly-forage migrants are partly driven by large-scale habitat availability, but it remains unclear to what extent wind support through large-scale wind regimes moulds their migratory behaviour. We aimed to determine to what extent a trans-equatorial fly-forage migrant engages in adaptive drift through distinct wind regimes and biomes across Africa. The Inter-tropical Front (ITF) marks a strong and seasonally shifting climatic boundary at the thermal equator, and we assessed whether migratory detours were associated with this climatic feature.

Disentangling drivers of power line use by vultures: Potential to reduce electrocutions.

Accidents on power lines are the leading cause of mortality for many raptor species. In order to prioritise corrective measures, much effort has been focused on identifying the factors associated with collision and electrocution risk. However, most studies lack of precise data about the use of pylons and its underlying driving factors, often relying on biased information based on recorded fatalities.

Understanding host utilization by mosquitoes: determinants, challenges and future directions.

Mosquito host utilization is a key factor in the transmission of vector-borne pathogens given that it greatly influences host-vector contact rates. Blood-feeding patterns of mosquitoes are not random, as some mosquitoes feed on particular species and/or individuals more than expected by chance. Mosquitoes use a number of cues including visual, olfactory, acoustic, and thermal stimuli emitted by vertebrate hosts to locate and identify their blood meal sources.

Cascading effects of climate variability on the breeding success of an edge population of an apex predator.

Large-scale environmental forces can influence biodiversity at different levels of biological organization. Climate, in particular, is often associated with species distributions and diversity gradients. However, its mechanistic link to population dynamics is still poorly understood.

Vultures and Livestock: The Where, When, and Why of Visits to Farms.

Recent changes in European legislation have legalized the abandonment of carcasses around livestock farms, but our understanding of how vultures exploit these semi-predictable food sources is still very limited. For filling this gap, we determine the individual and ecological drivers influencing vulture visits to farms. We assessed the effects of individual characteristics of both birds and farms on the frequency of vultures' visits to livestock facilities using data collected from 45 GPS-tagged Egyptian Vultures () and 318 farms (>94% of livestock) on Fuerteventura Island, Spain.

Determinants of the current and future distribution of the West Nile virus mosquito vector Culex pipiens in Spain.

Changes in environmental conditions, whether related or not to human activities, are continuously modifying the geographic distribution of vectors, which in turn affects the dynamics and distribution of vector-borne infectious diseases. Determining the main ecological drivers of vector distribution and how predicted changes in these drivers may alter their future distributions is therefore of major importance. However, the drivers of vector populations are largely specific to each vector species and region.

Mosquitoes are attracted by the odour of Plasmodium-infected birds.

Parasites can manipulate their hosts to increase their transmission success. Avian malaria parasites (Plasmodium) are thought to alter the cues such as host odour, used by host-seeking mosquitoes. Bird odour is affected by secretions from the uropygial gland and may play a role in modulating vector-host interactions.

Too much is bad: increasing numbers of livestock and conspecifics reduce body mass in an avian scavenger.

Individual traits such as body mass can serve as early warning signals of changes in the fitness prospects of animal populations facing environmental impacts. Here, taking advantage of a 19-yr monitoring, we assessed how individual, population, and environmental factors modulate long-term changes in the body mass of Canarian Egyptian vultures. Individual vulture body mass increased when primary productivity was highly variable, but decreased in years with a high abundance of livestock.

transmission differs between mosquito species and parasite lineages.

Factors such as the particular combination of parasite-mosquito species, their co-evolutionary history and the host's parasite load greatly affect parasite transmission. However, the importance of these factors in the epidemiology of mosquito-borne parasites, such as avian malaria parasites, is largely unknown. Here, we assessed the competence of two mosquito species [Culex pipiens and Aedes (Ochlerotatus) caspius], for the transmission of four avian Plasmodium lineages (Plasmodium relictum SGS1 and GRW11 and Plasmodium cathemerium-related lineages COLL1 and PADOM01) naturally infecting wild house sparrows.

House sparrow uropygial gland secretions do not attract ornithophilic nor mammophilic mosquitoes.

Mosquito feeding preferences determine host-vector contact rates and represent a key factor in the transmission of vector-borne pathogens. The semiochemical compounds of which vertebrate odours are composed probably play a role in mosquito host choice. Birds spread secretions from uropygial gland over their feathers to protect their plumage, comprising behaviour that may in turn affect odour profiles.

Experimental reduction of host Plasmodium infection load affects mosquito survival.

Plasmodium transmission success depends upon the trade-off between the use of host resources to favour parasite reproduction and the negative effects on host health, which can be mediated by infection intensity. Despite its potential influence on parasite dynamics, the effects of infection intensity on both, birds and vectors, and on Plasmodium transmission success are still poorly understood. Here, we experimentally reduced the Plasmodium load in naturally infected wild house sparrows with the antimalarial primaquine to assess the effects of intensity of infection in the vertebrate hosts on Plasmodium transmission to and by mosquitoes.

Breeding success but not mate choice is phenotype- and context-dependent in a color polymorphic raptor.

Morph-specific mate choice has been proposed as one of the evolutionary mechanisms that contribute to the maintenance of variation in color polymorphic systems. Coloration usually covaries with other phenotypic traits affecting life history and thus is often used as a criterion for mate choice. Here, we assess whether mating patterns, natal dispersal, and breeding output are phenotype-dependent in the color polymorphic Eleonora's falcon.

Effects of host sex, body mass and infection by avian Plasmodium on the biting rate of two mosquito species with different feeding preferences.

Background: The transmission of mosquito-borne pathogens is strongly influenced by the contact rates between mosquitoes and susceptible hosts. The biting rates of mosquitoes depend on different factors including the mosquito species and host-related traits (i.e.

Louse flies of Eleonora's falcons that also feed on their prey are evolutionary dead-end hosts for blood parasites.

Host shifts are widespread among avian haemosporidians, although the success of transmission depends upon parasite-host and parasite-vector compatibility. Insular avifaunas are typically characterized by a low prevalence and diversity of haemosporidians, although the underlying ecological and evolutionary processes remain unclear. We investigated the parasite transmission network in an insular system formed by Eleonora's falcons (the avian host), louse flies that parasitize the falcons (the potential vector), and haemosporidians (the parasites).

Vector Competence of Aedes caspius and Ae. albopictus Mosquitoes for Zika Virus, Spain.

We assessed the vector competence of Aedes caspius and Aedes albopictus mosquitoes in Spain for the transmission of Zika virus. Whereas Ae. albopictus mosquitoes were a competent vector, Ae.

Food predictability and social status drive individual resource specializations in a territorial vulture.

Despite increasing work detailing the presence of foraging specializations across a range of taxa, limited attention so far has been given to the role of spatiotemporal variation in food predictability in shaping individual resource selection. Here, we studied the exploitation of human-provided carrion resources differing in predictability by Canarian Egyptian vultures (Neophron percnopterus majorensis). We focussed specifically on the role of individual characteristics and spatial constraints in shaping patterns of resource use.

Probing into farmers' perceptions of a globally endangered ecosystem service provider.

Society's perception of ecosystem services is a key issue in conservation, particularly for endangered species providing services linked to human activities. Misperceptions may lead to wildlife-human conflicts with the risk of disappearance of the species involved. We contrasted farmers' perceptions with highly accurate quantitative data of an endangered vulture species, which provide ecosystem services.