Journal
ROYAL SOCIETY OPEN SCIENCE
Volume 4, Issue 4, Pages -Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rsos.170073
Keywords
agriculture; Chiroptera; ecoimmunology; ecotoxicology; spatio-temporal; wildlife health
Categories
Funding
- NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
- ARCS Foundation Award
- Sigma Xi
- Odum School of Ecology
- UGA Graduate School
- Explorer's Club
- UGA Biomedical and Health Sciences Institute
- NSF [DEB-1020966, DEB-1518611]
- NSF Research Coordination Network in Ecoimmunology [NSF IOS-0947177]
- Texas Christian University Research and Creative Activities Fund Award
- Wildlife Conservation Society
- Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research
- Yawkey Foundation
- Tom Yawkey Wildlife Center and Clemson University
- Sir Henry Dale Fellowship
- Wellcome Trust and Royal Society [102507/Z/13/Z]
- MRC [MC_UU_12014/8] Funding Source: UKRI
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Mercury (Hg) is a pervasive heavy metal that often enters the environment from anthropogenic sources such as gold mining and agriculture. Chronic exposure to Hg can impair immune function, reducing the ability of animals to resist or recover from infections. How Hg influences immunity and susceptibility remains unknown for bats, which appear immunologically distinct from other mammals and are reservoir hosts of many pathogens of importance to human and animal health. We here quantify total Hg (THg) in hair collected from common vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus), which feed on blood and are the main reservoir hosts of rabies virus in Latin America. We examine how diet, sampling site and year, and bat demography influence THg and test the consequences of this variation for eight immune measures. In two populations from Belize, THg concentrations in bats were best explained by an interaction between long-term diet inferred from stable isotopes and year. Bats that foraged more consistently on domestic animals exhibited higher THg.
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