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Bidirectional Interactions Between Behavior and Disease in Banded Mongooses (Mungos Mungo) Infected with Mycobacterium Mungi

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Bidirectional Interactions Between Behavior and Disease in Banded Mongooses (Mungos Mungo) Infected with Mycobacterium Mungi Bidirectional Interactions between Behavior and Disease in Banded Mongooses ( mungos mungo ) Infected with Mycobacterium mungi Bonnie Marie Fairbanks Dissertation submitted to the faculty of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In Biological Sciences Dana M. Hawley Kathleen A. Alexander William A. Hopkins Ignacio T. Moore Jeffery R. Walters July 26, 2013 Blacksburg, VA Keywords: banded mongoose, tuberculosis, disease ecology, behavioral ecology Bidirectional Interactions between Behavior and Disease in Banded Mongooses ( mungos mungo ) Infected with Mycobacterium mungi Bonnie Marie Fairbanks ABSTRACT Behavior and disease interact bidirectionally and on multiple levels of host organization, and these interactions can have important consequences for population-level disease dynamics. I explored how behavior can both influence and respond to infectious disease in a banded mongoose population experiencing epidemics of tuberculosis (TB) caused by the bacterial pathogen Mycobacterium mungi in the M. tuberculosis complex (Alexander et al. 2010). Banded mongooses are highly social carnivores that live in troops of 5 to 65 individuals. Mycobacterium mungi appears to be primarily environmentally transmitted, but direct horizontal transmission cannot be ruled out. Approximately 10-20% of mongooses become diseased with TB each year in the study population in and around Chobe National Park, Botswana, and all mongooses with clinical signs of TB die within months. Characteristics of both banded mongooses and clinical TB provided a productive study system for exploring interactions between behavior and disease: first, free-living mongooses can be habituated and directly observed; second, the clinical signs of TB can be visually assessed non-invasively; and third, the mongooses’ high sociality and egalitarianism provide a unique and ecologically relevant host social system for examining bidirectional interactions between behavior and infectious disease. I found that banded mongooses influenced and responded to disease through their behavior at both the individual and troop level, with possible implications for banded mongoose population and disease dynamics. Due to the environmental transmission of M. mungi , which appears to invade mongooses through breaks in the skin and nasal planum (Alexander et al. 2010), I focused on aggressive interactions as a potential risk factor for acquiring TB in this system. Troops with higher levels of aggression had more injuries, and at the individual level, injuries were a strong predictor of TB, suggesting that aggression may increase risk of disease by creating potential invasion sites for the pathogen. Troops were more aggressive when they foraged in garbage than when they foraged in other habitats, presumably due to the concentration of resources at this highly modified habitat. Overall, my results on how behavior can influence disease in this system suggest that anthropogenic supplementation of food, albeit inadvertent in this system, augments aggression levels in banded mongooses and may in turn lead to a higher incidence of TB. Second, I examined how behavior responds to disease in banded mongooses. Diseased individuals showed significantly lower activity and alertness, but intriguingly, did not show a reduction in overall social behaviors. Diseased individuals were less likely to disperse than healthy individuals, and healthy individuals with diseased troopmates may have been more likely to disperse than individuals without diseased troopmates. Despite this latter possible increase in dispersal in the presence of diseased conspecifics, diseased individuals were not avoided by their troopmates in daily social interactions. For example, diseased individuals were allogroomed at a higher than expected rate even though their reciprocation during allogrooming was approximately half that of healthy individuals. These interactions between behavior and disease have implications for banded mongoose troop and population dynamics, via changes in dispersal behavior and mortality, and can also affect disease dynamics, such as transmission rate. For example, changes to dispersal may affect the amount of inbreeding and outbreeding that occurs in this normally inbred species, and disease might be amplified in areas where aggression is increased by resource augmentation from humans. Additionally, the role that garbage plays in mongoose aggression suggests that humans may be inadvertently increasing disease incidence in this system, as well as in other taxa for which anthropogenic food augmentation may alter disease dynamics via changes in intraspecific aggression. This research sheds light on ways that behavior can influence and respond to disease that are often overlooked in disease ecology. iii Acknowledgements I could not have completed this stage in my life without the help of many people. I am very grateful to the owners and managers of the many business and residences that allowed me access to their property so that I could perform my research. I thank my committee for their support and guidance. I thank my fellow graduate students as well as my post-doctoral colleagues for their intellectual and emotional support. I am especially grateful to my friends in Blacksburg and Kasane for their love and care for me, especially those from Ekklesia Blacksburg and Kasane Open Baptist Church. I’m sure I would have given up without their emotional and spiritual encouragement, and I probably would not have survived without their day-to-day help in the seemingly mundane aspects of life, such as food, clothing, and shelter. Very special thanks goes to Pete Laver who assisted me in innumerable ways: professionally, emotionally, spiritually, and sometimes financially! From catching mongooses to cooking dinner, Pete was always willing to do anything for me. I also thank my family, who have put up with my world travels with great patience. My parents deserve an award for their child-rearing skills: I always believed I was capable of anything because they never gave me reason to believe otherwise. They supported me emotionally and financially far beyond what any parent is required to do. Finally and most importantly, I thank my Savior, who never leaves me nor forsakes me, and who shows me more of who he is through every experience of my life. iv Table of contents 1 Introduction: Interactions Between Host Social Behavior, Physiology, and Disease Susceptibility: The Role of Dominance Status and Social Context……………………………....1 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………….....1 Causes and Effects of Dominance Status.………………………………………………...3 Health Consequences of Dominance…………………………………………………….12 Challenges and Suggestions for Future Research………………………………………..15 Summary…………………………………………………………………………………19 Attribution……………………………………………………………………………….20 References……………………………………………………………………………….20 2 Do not feed the wildlife: Behavior and disease consequences of foraging in garbage for banded mongooses ( Mungos mungo )…………………………………………………………………….30 Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………..30 Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………...30 Methods…………………………………………………………………………………..32 Results……………………………………………………………………………………35 Discussion………………………………………………………………………………..37 Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………38 Attribution………………………………………………………………………………..39 Literature Cited…………………………………………………………………………..39 3 The impact of health status on dispersal behavior in banded mongooses ( Mungos mungo )…………………………………………………………………………………….……..42 Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………..42 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………....42 Methods…………………………………………………………………………………..44 Results……………………………………………………………………………………48 Conclusions………………………………………………………………………………50 Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………51 Attribution………………………………………………………………………………..52 Literature Cited…………………………………………………………………………..52 4 Infectious disease and behavior in banded mongooses: no evidence for avoidance of visibly diseased conspecifics in a highly social species………………………………………………....55 Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………..55 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………...55 Methods………………………………………………………………………………….58 Results……………………………………………………………………………………62 Discussion………………………………………………………………………………..65 Attribution……………………………………………………………………………….68 Literature Cited………………………………………………………………………….69 5 Synthesis and suggestions for future research………………………………………...……….73 Literature Cited………………………………………………………………………….77 v List of Table Table 1.1. Behavioral and physiological correlates of dominance………......……..……………10 Table 2.1. Parameter estimates and differences of each area type………………………………36 Table 3.1. Summary of the observed dispersal events in our study population…………………48 Table 4.1. Disease avoidance behavior in various species………………………………………56 Table 4.2. Ethogram and categorization of behaviors…………………………………………...59 Table 4.3. Type III tests of fixed effects for GLMMs for proportions of time active, resting, and alert……………………………………………………………………………………………....63 Table 4.4. Type III tests of fixed effects for GLMMs for proportion of time social and behavioral transition rate…………………………………………………………………………………….63 List of Figures Figure 2.1. The number of aggressive sounds emitted by banded mongooses per minute during each foraging bout, by area type……………………………………………………………...….35 Figure 2.2. Percentage of tuberculosis in injured and uninjured mongooses………………...….37 Figure 3.1. The percentage of individuals
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