Journal
PARASITOLOGY
Volume 138, Issue 1, Pages 71-79Publisher
CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1017/S0031182010001046
Keywords
disease ecology; dispersal; pathogen transmission; reservoir host; Siphonaptera; Yersinia pestis
Categories
Funding
- NSF/NIH [DEB-0224328]
- National Center for Environmental Research (NCER) [R-82909101-0]
- Boulder County Parks and Open Space Department
- Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado
- Beverly Sears Fund
- University of Colorado
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Oropsylla hirsuta is the primary flea of the black-tailed prairie dog and is a vector of the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis. We examined the population genetic structure of O. hirsuta fleas collected from 11 prairie dog colonies, 7 of which had experienced a plague-associated die-off in 1994. In a sample of 332 O. hirsuta collected from 226 host individuals, we detected 24 unique haplotype sequences in a 480 nucleotide segment of the cytochrome oxidase II gene. We found significant overall population structure but we did not detect a signal of isolation by distance, suggesting that O. hirsuta may be able to disperse relatively quickly at the scale of this study. All 7 colonies that were recently decimated by plague showed signs of recent population expansion, whereas 3 of the 4 plague-negative colonies showed haplotype patterns consistent with stable populations. These results suggest that O. hirsuta populations are affected by plague-induced prairie dog die-offs and that flea dispersal among prairie dog colonies may not be dependent exclusively on dispersal of prairie dogs. Re-colonization following plague events from plague-free refugia may allow for rapid flea population expansion following plague epizootics.
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