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Phylogeny of bat species (Upham et al., 2019). Red shading highlights clades of bats identified as overrepresented in our dataset via phylogenetic factorization.
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Tropical regions are experiencing rapid rates of forest fragmentation, which can have several effects on wildlife, including altered parasite dynamics. Bats are a useful host group to consider the effects of fragmentation, because they are abundant in the tropics, serve important ecological roles, and harbor many parasites. Nevertheless, research o...
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With approximately 1,400 known species, 184 of which are found in Brazil, the order Chiroptera is the second most diverse among mammals, and this taxon is relevant in terms of the ecosystem services it provides to humans. However, disturbances caused by anthropogenic factors amplify processes of extinction, changes in geographic distributions, and...
Citations
... These standardized datasets are generally limited by their taxonomic scope: for example, the Global Mammal Parasite Database is focused on primates, ungulates and carnivores, with no data on the two orders of mammals (rodents and bats) that contain the most species 251 . Researchers can also generate custom datasets by extracting data from the literature; meta-analyses that control for the effects of sampling effort and detection methods across studies can use these datasets to make more confident inferences about the effects of environmental drivers 233,252,253 . ...
... This specificity reflects the phylogeny of the parasites, which correlates with their hosts' one (e. g. Heckley and Becker 2023;Poulin and Mouillot 2005;Presley et al. 2015). ...
Bats provide essential ecosystem services and some are cave dependent. Caves favour the association of bats with ectoparasite Diptera, however, they are poorly
sampled in the Amazon biome. Here we present the first description of a community of bats and bat flies from the largest sandstone cave in Brazil, the Planaltina cave, located in the municipality of Brasil Novo, state of Pará. Diptera were removed from captured bats and taken to the laboratory for identification. From nine species of bats belonging to four families we recorded 17 species of Diptera, 13 were monoxenous. A possible explanation for the monoxenous parasites collected is that flies have poor survival in unusual hosts. These results are an indicator that the Streblid species are host-specific since even if the hosts take refuge in the same cave, they will not share their parasites. Therefore, the present study provides important information on the parasite-host dynamics in a cave, thus highlighting the
importance of cave as are essential shelters for bat species and, despite reported cases of cohabitation, mixed colonies are unlikely to form.
