At the edges of forests in southwestern Panama, the researchers set up 24 experimental plots. They left some sites alone. In others, they mimicked diversity loss by regularly trapping and removing rodents, but allowing pygmy rice rats and cane mice to stay put. Five months later, the scientists report this month in the journal PLoS ONE, both pygmy rice rats and cane rats had increased in abundance in the experimental plots. Even more striking, the proportion of these animals infected in with hantavirus nearly tripled in those plots -- from 12 percent to 35 percent. "That's a bad thing as far as hantavirus is concerned," Ostfeld said. "We know that human risk is related to the number of infected rodents running around." The new study is the first field-based experimental evidence for the link between diversity and disease, and that's a big step, said Pieter Johnson, a disease ecologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Still, he said, the relationship is complex. Simply having more species in an area is not as important as having a certain combination of species, and scientists haven't yet worked out all of those details. It's been hard to convince people to care about biodiversity, added Johnson, whose recent lab experiments have linked fluke worm diversity with rates of schistosomiasis, a parasitic disease. These new studies might help convince people to protect species they may not have had the energy to care about before. "The potential link that biodiversity loss could actually hurt human health or wildlife health is a pretty eye-opening concept for many people," Johnson said. "If we don't want to get sick, then we need to keep more species around." Related Links: |
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