Publications by authors named "Mathieu Garel"

Article Synopsis
  • Caring for newborns limits mammalian females' ability to gather resources, especially during the energy-demanding early lactation period.
  • Different ungulates have developed various strategies for protecting their vulnerable newborns, from staying hidden to being mobile, which can influence their mothers' movement patterns.
  • A study of 54 populations of 23 ungulate species shows that maternal movements are affected by the resource availability and type of neonatal strategy, highlighting the importance of these tactics in understanding how species adapt to environmental changes.
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Background: Network theory is largely applied in real-world systems to assess landscape connectivity using empirical or theoretical networks. Empirical networks are usually built from discontinuous individual movement trajectories without knowing the effect of relocation frequency on the assessment of landscape connectivity while theoretical networks generally rely on simple movement rules. We investigated the combined effects of relocation sampling frequency and landscape fragmentation on the assessment of landscape connectivity using simulated trajectories and empirical high-resolution (1 Hz) trajectories of Alpine ibex (Capra ibex).

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Ticks are major vectors of various pathogens of health importance, such as bacteria, viruses and parasites. The problems associated with ticks and vector-borne pathogens are increasing in mountain areas, particularly in connection with global climate change. We collected ticks (n = 2,081) from chamois and mouflon in 4 mountainous areas of France.

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Animals perceive human activities as risky and generally respond with fear-induced proactive behaviors to buffer the circadian patterns of lethal and nonlethal disturbances, such as diel migrations (DMs) between risky places during safe nighttime and safer places during risky daytime. However, such responses potentially incur costs through movement or reduced foraging time, so individuals should adjust their tolerance when human activities are harmless, through habituation. Yet this is a challenging cognitive task when lethal and nonlethal risks co-occur, forming complex landscapes of fear.

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Understanding the consequences of global change for animal movement is a major issue for conservation and management. In particular, habitat fragmentation generates increased densities of linear landscape features that can impede movements. While the influence of these features on animal movements has been intensively investigated, they may also play a key role at broader spatial scales (e.

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Article Synopsis
  • Global warming is altering vegetation phenology, significantly impacting herbivores in alpine ecosystems, where synchronizing plant growth with herbivore needs is crucial for their survival.
  • A long-term study on Pyrenean chamois revealed that earlier springs provide access to higher-quality forage but do not change diet composition; however, increased population density led to reduced diet quality due to competition for resources.
  • Understanding these dietary changes in herbivores is vital for predicting the broader ecological effects of climate change on ecosystems.
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The diet composition of ungulates is important to understand not only their impact on vegetation, but also to understand the consequences of natural and human-driven environmental changes on the foraging behavior of these mammals. In this work, we evaluated the use of near infrared reflectance spectroscopy analysis (NIRS), a quick, economic and non-destructive method, to assess the diet composition of the Pyrenean chamois . Fecal samples ( = 192) were collected from two chamois populations in the French and Spanish Pyrenees.

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Several individual, environmental and parasitic factors can influence the impacts of parasites on host's fitness and on host's ability to transmit these parasites to new hosts. Identifying these factors and the individuals who play a greater role in parasite transmission is of main concern for the development of parasite control strategies. In the present study, we aimed to describe the diversity of gastrointestinal parasites and to identify the individual factors influencing the faecal spreading of parasites in a free-ranging population of Mediterranean mouflon.

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Allometric relationships describe the proportional covariation between morphological, physiological, or life-history traits and the size of the organisms. Evolutionary allometries estimated among species are expected to result from species differences in ontogenetic allometry, but it remains uncertain whether ontogenetic allometric parameters and particularly the ontogenetic slope can evolve. In bovids, the nonlinear evolutionary allometry between horn length and body mass in males suggests systematic changes in ontogenetic allometry with increasing species body mass.

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Gastro-intestinal nematodes, especially Haemonchus contortus, are widespread pathogenic parasites of small ruminants. Studying their spatial genetic structure is as important as studying host genetic structure to fully understand host-parasite interactions and transmission patterns. For parasites having a simple life cycle (e.

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Article Synopsis
  • This study investigates the prevalence of tick-borne infections in ticks collected from an area in Southwestern France, particularly focusing on the Pyrenean chamois population.
  • A total of 1971 ticks were examined, identifying them all as Ixodes ricinus, and various pathogens were detected using PCR assays, with notable prevalence rates for different infections.
  • The study found new instances of Babesia sp. EU1 and Rickettsia helvetica, raising awareness about potential health risks to both human visitors and wildlife in the region.
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Background: Parasite infections can have substantial impacts on population dynamics and are accordingly a key challenge for wild population management. Here we studied genetic mechanisms driving parasite resistance in a large herbivore through a comprehensive approach combining measurements of neutral (16 microsatellites) and adaptive (MHC DRB1 exon 2) genetic diversity and two types of gastrointestinal parasites (nematodes and coccidia).

Results: While accounting for other extrinsic and intrinsic predictors known to impact parasite load, we show that both neutral genetic diversity and DRB1 are associated with resistance to gastrointestinal nematodes.

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Decomposing the life track of an animal into behavioral segments is a fundamental challenge for movement ecology. The proliferation of high-resolution data, often collected many times per second, offers much opportunity for understanding animal movement. However, the sheer size of modern data sets means there is an increasing need for rapid, novel computational techniques to make sense of these data.

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Infectious diseases raise many concerns for wildlife and new insights must be gained to manage infected populations. Wild ungulates provide opportunities to gain such insights as they host many pathogens. Using modelling and data collected from an intensively monitored population of Pyrenean chamois, we investigated the role of stochastic processes in governing epidemiological patterns of pestivirus spread in both protected and hunted populations.

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When they visit and revisit specific areas, animals may reveal what they need from their home range and how they acquire information. The temporal dimension of such movement recursions, that is, periodicity, is however rarely studied, yet potentially bears a species, population or individual-specific signature. A recent method allows estimating the contribution of periodic patterns to the variance in a movement path.

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Fine-scale spatial genetic structure of populations results from social and spatial behaviors of individuals such as sex-biased dispersal and philopatry. However, the demographic history of a given population can override such socio-spatial factors in shaping genetic variability when bottlenecks or founder events occurred in the population. Here, we investigated whether socio-spatial organization determines the fine-scale genetic structure for both sexes in a Mediterranean mouflon (×  sp.

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Article Synopsis
  • Understanding host-pathogen interactions is crucial for managing epidemics, as shown by the emergence of a pestivirus in Pyrenean chamois since 2001, which has had varying impacts across different populations.
  • A study in France revealed that the virus self-cleared in a chamois population, likely due to factors such as limited population exchanges and herd immunity, leading to a decrease in antibody prevalence post-2014.
  • The demographic shift towards younger chamois after the virus self-clearance suggests possible changes in population structure and highlights the importance of metapopulation dynamics in explaining local variations in virus behavior.
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The cost of current reproduction on survival or future reproduction is one of the most studied trade-offs governing resource distribution between fitness components. Results have often been clouded, however, by the existence of individual heterogeneity, with high-quality individuals able to allocate energy to several functions simultaneously, at no apparent cost. Surprisingly, it has also rarely been assessed within a breeding season by breaking down the various reproductive efforts of females from gestation to weaning, even though resource availability and energy requirements vary greatly.

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Optimal management of free-ranging herbivores requires the accurate assessment of an animal's nutritional status. For this purpose 'near-infrared reflectance spectroscopy' (NIRS) is very useful, especially when nutritional assessment is done through faecal indicators such as faecal nitrogen (FN). In order to perform an NIRS calibration, the default protocol recommends starting by generating an initial equation based on at least 50-75 samples from the given species.

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Background: Even though male-biased parasitism is common in mammals, little effort has been made to evaluate whether higher parasitic burden in males results in an extra biological cost, and thus a decrease in fitness. Body condition impairment and the augmentation of oxidative stress can be used as indicators of the cost of parasite infections. Here, we examined relationships between gastrointestinal and respiratory helminths, body condition and oxidative stress markers (glutathione peroxidase, paraoxonase-1) in 28 Pyrenean chamois (Rupicapra p.

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Recent advances in animal ecology have enabled identification of certain mechanisms that lead to the emergence of territories and home ranges from movements considered as unbounded. Among them, memory and familiarity have been identified as key parameters in cognitive maps driving animal navigation, but have been only recently used in empirical analyses of animal movements. At the same time, the influence of landscape features on movements of numerous species and on space division in territorial animals has been highlighted.

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Though it is accepted that emerging infectious diseases are a threat to planet biodiversity, little information exists about their role as drivers of species extinction. Populations are also affected by natural catastrophes and other pathogens, making it difficult to estimate the particular impact of emerging infectious diseases. Border disease virus genogroup 4 (BDV-4) caused a previously unreported decrease in populations of Pyrenean chamois (Rupicapra pyrenaica pyrenaica) in Spain.

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In seasonal environments, birth dates are a central component for a species' life history, with potential long-term fitness consequences. Yet our understanding of selective pressures of environmental changes on birth dates is limited in wild mammals due to the difficulty of data collection. In a context of rapid climate change, the question of a possible mismatch between plant phenology and birth phenology also remains unanswered for most species.

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In many species, population dynamics are shaped by age-structured demographic parameters, such as survival, which can cause age-specific sensitivity to environmental conditions. Accordingly, we can expect populations with different age-specific survival to be differently affected by environmental variation. However, this hypothesis is rarely tested at the intra-specific level.

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