Marion East

Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research · Department of Evolutionary Ecology

The intestinal mucosa is at the front line of host-microbiome interactions, but little is known about these interactions within natural populations. Here, we non-invasively investigated associations between the gut microbiome and mucosal immune measures while controlling for host, social, and ecological factors in 199 samples of 158 wild spotted hy...

In mammalian societies, dominance hierarchies translate into inequalities in health, reproductive performance and survival. DNA methylation is thought to mediate the effects of social status on gene expression and phenotypic outcomes, yet a study of social status-specific DNA methylation profiles in different age classes in a wild social mammal is...

In Africa, burgeoning human populations promote agricultural expansion and the associated demand for water. Water abstraction for agriculture from perennial rivers can be detrimental for wildlife, particularly when it reduces water availability in protected areas. Ruaha National Park (Ruaha NP) in southern Tanzania, one of the largest parks in Afri...

In Africa, burgeoning human populations promote agricultural expansion and the associated demand for water. Water abstraction for agriculture from perennial rivers can be detrimental for wildlife, particularly when it reduces water availability in protected areas. Ruaha National Park in southern Tanzania, one of the largest parks in Africa, contain...

Habitat and food resource partitioning are predicted to facilitate the coexistence of similar-sized carnivores. The golden jackal (Canis aureus) and silver-backed jackal (Canis mesomelas) are similar-sized canids that respectively inhabit grassland and woodland in the Serengeti ecosystem, Tanzania. As information on the diet and food-intake of thes...

Studies on humans indicate that encountering multiple sources of adversity in childhood increases the risk of poor long‐term health and premature death. Far less is known about cumulative effects of adversity during early life in wildlife. Focusing on the spotted hyena Crocuta crocuta, a social mammal with small litters, extensive maternal care, sl...

Extensive bushmeat hunting is a major threat to wildlife conservation worldwide, particularly when unselective methods such as wire snares kill target and non‐target species (by‐catch). Animals that escape from snares have injuries of varying severity, with effects on performance that are largely unknown, as most studies typically focus on immediat...

Infanticide by adult females includes any substantial contribution to the demise of young and inevitably imposes fitness costs on the victim’s genetic fathers, thereby generating sexual conflict with them. Few if any studies have quantified the impact of infanticide by females on male reproductive success, the magnitude of sexual conflict this caus...

Little is known about potential cascading effects of climate change on the ability of predators to exploit mobile aggregations of prey with a spatiotemporal distribution largely determined by climatic conditions. If predators employ central-place foraging when rearing offspring, the ability of parents to locate sufficient prey could be reduced by c...

Wild carnivores are threatened by human activities, particularly by lethal responses to livestock predation. As natural prey populations decline, predation of livestock and consumption of discarded livestock ‘waste’ (carcasses and body parts) should increase. We investigated whether parameters linked to the production of livestock waste affected th...

Social networks are considered to be ‘highly modular’ when individuals within one module are more connected to each other than they are to individuals in other modules. It is currently unclear how highly modular social networks influence the persistence of contagious pathogens that generate lifelong immunity in their hosts when between‐group intera...

Background Improved knowledge on vector-borne pathogens in wildlife will help determine their effect on host species at the population and individual level and whether these are affected by anthropogenic factors such as global climate change and landscape changes. Here, samples from brown hyenas ( Parahyaena brunnea ) from Namibia (BHNA) and spotte...

Host immune defenses are important components of host-parasite interactions that affect the outcome of infection and may have fitness consequences for hosts when increased allocation of resources to immune responses undermines other essential life processes. Research on host-parasite interactions in large free-ranging wild mammals is currently hamp...

The Alphacoronavirus‐1 species include viruses that infect numerous mammalian species. To better understand the wide host range of these viruses, better knowledge on the molecular determinants of virus‐host cell entry mechanisms in wildlife hosts is essential. We investigated Alphacoronavirus‐1 infection in carnivores using long‐term data on Sereng...

In climates with seasonally limited precipitation, terrestrial animals congregate at high densities at scarce water sources. We hypothesize that viruses can exploit the recurrence of these diverse animal congregations to spread. In this paper, we test the central prediction of this hypothesis -- that viruses employing this transmission strategy rem...

In wildlife, endoparasite burden can be affected by host life history stage, environmental conditions, host abundance, and parasite co-infections. We tested the effects of these factors on gastrointestinal parasite infection in plains zebras (Equus quagga) in the Serengeti ecosystem, Tanzania, using fecal egg counts of two nematode families (Strong...

In social species where offspring are reared together in communal burrows or similar structures, young animals typically do not engage in between-group contact during their development, a behavioural trait we call offspring with restricted between-group contact (ORC). The impact of this trait on the persistence of contagious pathogens that generate...

Wild mammals in ex-situ captivity experience substantially different environmental conditions compared to free-ranging conspecifics, e.g. in terms of diet, climatic conditions, social factors, movement space, and direct anthropogenic disturbance. Moreover, animals in captivity frequently undergo management interventions such as medical treatments w...

Time is a limited resource and how well it is allocated to competing behaviours can profoundly affect Darwinian fitness. Life history theory predicts that the amount of time allocated to vital behaviours will change with life history stage, resulting in trade-offs between competing behaviours. Moreover, a range of environmental factors can also aff...

Determining species distributions can be extremely challenging but is crucial to ecological and conservation research. Environmental DNA (eDNA) approaches have shown particular promise in aquatic systems for several vertebrate and invertebrate species. For terrestrial animals, however, eDNA-based surveys are considerably more difficult due to the l...

Abstract There are substantial individual differences in parasite composition and infection load in wildlife populations. Few studies have investigated the factors shaping this heterogeneity in large wild mammals or the impact of parasite infections on Darwinian fitness, particularly in juveniles. A host's parasite composition and infection load ca...

Toxoplasma gondii is an ubiquitous intracellular protozoan parasite. Mammals and birds are intermediate hosts and felid species are definitive hosts. In most human altered habitats the domestic cat is the predominant definitive host. Current knowledge of T. gondii infection in African ecosystems is limited. This study aimed to assess exposure to T....

Predicting the impact of disease epidemics on wildlife populations is one of the twenty-first century’s main conservation challenges. The long-term demographic responses of wildlife populations to epidemics and the life history and social traits modulating these responses are generally unknown, particularly for K-selected social species. Here we de...

Estimating eco-epidemiological parameters in free-ranging populations can be challenging. As known individuals may be undetected during a field session, or their health status uncertain, the collected data are typically “imperfect”. Multi-event capture-mark-recapture (MECMR) models constitute a substantial methodological advance by accounting for s...

All values for bias and precision.

Case study of Serengeti spotted hyenas infected with canine distemper virus.

Viruses may have a dramatic impact on the health of their animal hosts. The patho-physiological mechanisms underlying viral infections in animals are, however, not well understood. It is increasingly recognized that oxidative stress may be a major physiological cost of viral infections. Here we compare three blood-based markers of oxidative status...

Adverse environmental stimuli (stressors) activate the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and contribute to allostatic load. This study investigates the contribution of environmental stressors and life history stage to allostatic load in a migratory population of plains zebras (Equus quagga) in the Serengeti ecosystem, in Tanzania, which exp...

The extent to which the fitness costs of infection are mediated by key life‐history traits such as age or social status is still unclear. Within populations, individual heterogeneity in the outcome of infection is the result of two successive processes; the degree of contact with the pathogen (exposure) and the immune response to infection. In soci...

In mammals, two factors likely to affect the diversity and composition of intestinal bacteria (bacterial microbiome) and eukaryotes (eukaryome) are social status and age. In species in which social status determines access to resources, socially dominant animals maintain better immune processes and health status than subordinates. As high species d...

Was the 1993/1994 fatal canine distemper virus (CDV) epidemic in lions and spotted hyaenas in the Serengeti ecosystem caused by the recent spillover of a virulent domestic dog strain or one well adapted to these noncanids? We examine this question using sequence data from 13 ‘Serengeti’ strains including five complete genomes obtained between 1993...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0128706.].

The genus Sapovirus, in the family Caliciviridae, includes enteric viruses of humans and domestic animals. Information on sapovirus infection of wildlife is limited and is currently lacking for any free-ranging wildlife species in Africa. By screening a large number of predominantly fecal samples (n = 631) obtained from five carnivore species in th...

Alphaherpesviruses are highly prevalent in equine populations and co-infections with more than one of these viruses’ strains frequently diagnosed. Lytic replication and latency with subsequent reactivation, along with new episodes of disease, can be influenced by genetic diversity generated by spontaneous mutation and recombination. Latency enhance...

Income breeders which forage without their offspring in attendance should adjust nursing frequency and the quantity and composition of milk to prevailing ecological conditions, and increase the quantity or quality of milk transferred if the frequency of nursing visits declines. When milk delivery to a litter is insufficient, sibling competition sho...

In semi-arid environments, ‘permanent’ rivers are essential sources of surface water for wildlife during ‘dry’ seasons when rainfall is limited or absent, particularly for species whose resilience to water scarcity is low. The hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius) requires submersion in water to aid thermoregulation and prevent skin damage by solar...

Supporting information file, including data used for the mixed-model negative binomial regression. Data ordered by Year (2012, 2013), Month (in two week intervals, first half of the month and second half of the month from June to November) and Monitoring location (1–14). Other variables are Census number for each dry season (1–11), categorization o...

Equine herpesvirus type 1 (EHV-1) causes respiratory disorders and abortion in equids while EHV-1 regularly causes equine herpesvirus myeloencephalopathy (EHM), a stroke-like syndrome following endothelial cell infection in horses. Both EHV-1 and EHV-9 infections of non-definitive hosts often result in neuronal infection and high case fatality rate...

As water is essential for life, animals have adaptations that increase their ability to survive during periods of water shortage. Accessing water by digging is one behavioural adaptation to water shortage used by some African mammals. Digging might also provide access to higher quality water below ground when surface water quality is poor. We inves...

Enzyme immunoassays (EIA) that measure faecal testosterone metabolites (fTM) are useful tools to monitor gonadal activity. The aim of this study was to validate an "in-house" epiandrosterone EIA to monitor fTM in spotted hyenas. FTM were characterised in a male and a female hyena that each received an injection of 3H-testosterone. High-performance...

Life-history theory predicts that when food intake and body reserves are insufficient to maintain all life processes, resource allocation trade-offs should occur. Lactation is costly and requires increased food intake. In spotted hyaenas, energy expenditure on lactation is high, particularly for mothers rearing twin litters, and foraging effort and...

Knowledge of kobuvirus (Family Picornaviridae) infection in carnivores is limited and has not been described in domestic or wild carnivores in Africa.To fill thisgap in knowledge we used RT-PCR to screen fresh feces from several African carnivores.We detected kobuvirus RNA in samples from domestic dog, golden jackal,side-striped jackal and spotted...

This report describes three possibly related incidences of encephalitis, two of them lethal, in captive polar bears (Ursus maritimus). Standard diagnostic methods failed to identify pathogens in any of these cases. A comprehensive, three stage diagnostic ‘pipeline’, employing both standard serological methods and new DNA microarray and next generat...

We provide the first genetic sequence data for a Dipylidium species from a wild carnivore plus an analysis of the effects of ecological, demographic, physiological and behavioural factors on Dipylidium sp. infection prevalence in a social carnivore, the spotted hyaena (Crocuta crocuta), in the Serengeti National Park, Tanzania. Our sequence data fr...

Allostatis is the process of maintaining homeostatis through behavioural or physiological responses to challenges, and its cumulative energetic cost is termed allostatic load. The allostatic load hypothesis predicts that hunger and the mechanisms that establish and maintain social dominance should have a strong impact on allostatic load. In spotted...

Knowledge of coronaviruses in wild carnivores is limited. This report describes coronavirus genetic diversity, species specificity and infection prevalence in three wild African carnivores. Coronavirus RNA was recovered from fresh feces from spotted hyena and silver-backed jackal, but not bat-eared fox. Analysis of sequences of membrane (M) and spi...

We investigated the effect of sex, social status and life-stage on three behaviours (pasting, dry-pasting and pawing) associated with olfactory communication in the spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta). Pasting is a behaviour used to place a fatty, anal scent gland secretion on vegetation. Dry-pasting behaviour resembles pasting except that scent is not...

Theoretically, homogeneous environments favor the evolution of specialists whereas heterogeneous environments favor generalists. Canine distemper is a multi-host carnivore disease caused by canine distemper virus (CDV). The described cell receptor of CDV is SLAM (CD150). Attachment of CDV hemagglutinin protein (CDV-H) to this receptor facilitates f...

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In this chapter we discuss whether the vastness of the Serengeti National Park (SNP) in northern Tanzania and associated protected areas minimises three forms of human–wildlife conflict: livestock predation by carnivores, bushmeat hunting and pathogen transmission between domestic animals and wildlife. The SNP covers 14,763 km2 and is surrounded by...

Pathogens often have a limited host range, but some can opportunistically jump to new species. Anthropogenic activities that mix reservoir species with novel, hence susceptible, species [1] can provide opportunities for pathogens to spread beyond their normal host range. Furthermore, rapid evolution can produce new pathogens by mechanisms such as g...

Within-brood or -litter dominance provides fitness-related benefits if dominant siblings selfishly skew access to food provided by parents in their favour. Models of facultative siblicide assume that dominants exert complete control over their subordinate sibling's access to food and that control is maintained, irrespective of the subordinate's hun...

The use of enzyme immunoassays (EIAs) to measure faecal glucocorticoid metabolites (fGCM) is a useful non-invasive technique to monitor adrenocortical activity in vertebrates. The first objective of this study was to validate an ‘in-house’ EIA (cortisol-3-CMO) for the measurement of fGCM concentrations in spotted hyenas. High-performance liquid chr...

Using the complete haemagglutinin (HA) gene and partial phosphoprotein (P) gene we investigated the genotype of canine distemper virus (CDV) strains recovered from two wildlife species in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany. Phylogenetic analyses demonstrated significant differences between the strains from raccoons Procyon lotor (family Procyonidae) o...

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##Assembly-Data-START## Assembly Method :: BioEdit v. 7.0.9.0 Sequencing Technology :: Sanger dideoxy sequencing ##Assembly-Data-END##