Scott Carver

University of Georgia | UGA · Odum School of Ecology

Sarcoptes scabiei mites and skin lesions consistent with severe sarcoptic mange were identified in a Tasmanian devil (Sarcophilus harrisii) and Bennett's wallaby (Notamacropus rufogriseus) from Tasmania, Australia. The devil and wallaby both had severe hyperkeratotic skin lesions. All stages of mite development were identified in the devil, suggest...

There is a critical need for advancements in disease management strategies for wildlife, but free‐living animals pose numerous challenges that can hinder progress. Most disease management attempts involve fixed interventions accompanied by post hoc outcome assessments focused on success or failure. Though these approaches have led to valuable manag...

Context The global impact of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has been uneven, with some regions experiencing significant excess mortality while others have been relatively unaffected. Yet factors which predict this variation remain enigmatic, particularly at large spatial scales. Objectives We aimed to uncover the key drivers of excess mortality across co...

Feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) is the domestic cat analogue of HIV infection in humans. Both viruses induce oral disease in untreated individuals, with clinical signs that include gingivitis and periodontal lesions. Oral disease manifestations in HIV patients are abated by highly effective combination antiretroviral therapy (cART), though cert...

Sarcoptic mange, caused by epidermal infection with Sarcoptes scabiei, negatively impacts the health, welfare, and local abundance of bare-nosed wombats (Vombatus ursinus) in Australia. Improved understanding of the host immune response to disease and its contribution to pathophysiology could be used to inform management actions for this species in...

Outbreaks of sarcoptic mange are sporadically reported in koala populations across Australia, but disease characteristics (e.g., distribution across the body) remain poorly understood. In an area of Northern Victoria regular cases coming into care suggest mange may have become enzootic, and here we characterise those koala mange admission records....

Patterns of extinction risk can vary across taxa, with species of some groups being particularly vulnerable to extinction. Rails (Aves: Rallidae) represent one of the most extreme yet well-documented cases of mass extinction within a modern vertebrate group. Between 54 and 92% of rail species became extinct following waves of human contact during b...

We report tracking of bacterial skin microbiota for two bare-nosed wombats (Vombatus ursinus) following in situ treatment for sarcoptic mange. Sarcoptes scabiei, the etiologic agent, has dramatic effects on skin microbiota. Our case reports show differing disease trajectory and bacterial beta diversity between the two treated individuals.

Background Sarcoptic mange is a serious animal welfare concern in bare-nosed wombats (Vombatus ursinus). Fluralaner (Bravecto®) is a novel acaricide that has recently been utilised for treating mange in wombats. The topical ‘spot-on’ formulation of fluralaner can limit treatment delivery options in situ, but dilution to a volume for ‘pour-on’ deliv...

The use of therapeutic agents is a critical option to manage wildlife disease, but their implementation is usually spatially constrained. We seek to expand knowledge around the effectiveness of management of environmentally-transmitted Sarcoptes scabiei on a host population, by studying the effect of a spatially constrained treatment regime on dise...

Dispersal is an important process that is widely studied across species, and it can be influenced by intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Intrinsic factors commonly assessed include the sex and age of individuals, while landscape features are frequently-tested extrinsic factors. Here, we investigated the effects of both sex and landscape composition an...

The mechanisms driving dynamics of many epidemiologically important mosquito-borne pathogens are complex, involving combinations of vector and host factors (e.g., species composition and life-history traits), and factors associated with transmission and reporting. Understanding which intrinsic mechanisms contribute most to observed disease dynamics...

Hunting can fundamentally alter wildlife population dynamics, but the consequences of hunting on pathogen transmission and evolution remain poorly understood. Here we present a study that leverages a unique landscape-scale experiment coupled with pathogen transmission tracing, network simulation and phylodynamics to provide insights into how huntin...

The bare-nosed wombat is an iconic Australian fauna with remarkable biological characteristics and mythology. This solitary, muscular, fossorial, herbivorous marsupial from southeast Australia has continent and continental island subspeciation. Vombatiformes also contains hairy-nosed wombats ( Lasiorhinus spp.); koala ( Phascolarctos cinereus); and...

Predicting what factors promote or protect populations from infectious disease is a fundamental epidemiological challenge. Social networks, where nodes represent hosts and edges represent direct or indirect contacts between them, are important in quantifying these aspects of infectious disease dynamics. However, how network structure and epidemic p...

Wildlife managers often rely on population estimates, but estimates can be challenging to obtain for geographically widespread species. Spotlight surveys provide abundance data for many species and, when conducted over wide spatial scales, have potential to provide population estimates of geographically widespread species. The bare‐nosed wombat ( V...

Invasive environmentally transmitted parasites have the potential to cause declines in host populations independent of host density, but this is rarely characterized in naturally occurring populations. We investigated (1) epidemiological features of a declining bare-nosed wombat (Vombatus ursinus) population in central Tasmania owing to a sarcoptic...

The global impact of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has been uneven, with some regions experiencing significant excess mortality while others have been relatively unaffected. Yet factors which predict this variation remain enigmatic, particularly at large spatial scales. We used spatially explicit Bayesian models that integrate socio-demographic and endem...

Identifying environmental characteristics that limit species' distributions is important for contemporary conservation and inferring responses to future environmental change. The Tasmanian native hen is an island endemic flightless rail and a survivor of a prehistoric extirpation event. Little is known about the regional-scale environmental charact...

Most pathogens infect more than one host species, and given infection, the individual-level impact they have varies among host species. Nevertheless, variation in individual-level impacts of infection remains poorly characterised. Using the impactful and host-generalist ectoparasitic mite Sarcoptes scabiei (causing sarcoptic mange), we assessed ind...

Understanding the spatial dynamics and drivers of wildlife pathogens is constrained by sampling logistics, with implications for advancing the field of landscape epidemiology and targeted allocation of management resources. However, visually apparent wildlife diseases, when combined with remote‐surveillance and distribution modelling technologies,...

Objective: To describe the first outbreak of Barmah Forest virus (BFv) in Tasmania and identify potential vectors for BFv in Tasmania. Methods: A retrospective descriptive study of BFv notifications in the Tasmanian Notifiable Diseases Database (TNDD) was conducted. Adult mosquitoes were sampled from areas near outbreak cases and pooled samples...

Feline Immunodeficiency Virus (FIV) causes progressive immune dysfunction in cats similar to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in humans. Although combination antiretroviral therapy (cART) is effective against HIV, there is no definitive therapy to improve clinical outcomes in cats with FIV. This study therefore evaluated pharmacokinetics and clin...

Landscape epidemiology provides a valuable framework to interpret, predict, and manage spatiotemporal patterns of disease. Yet, owing to the difficulty of detecting pathogen occurrence in free-ranging wildlife, disentangling the factors driving disease dynamics remains a considerable challenge, particularly at fine spatial scales. Here, we investig...

Sarcoptes scabiei is the microscopic burrowing mite responsible for sarcoptic mange, which is reported in approximately 150 mammalian species. In Australia, sarcoptic mange affects a number of native and introduced wildlife species, is particularly severe in bare-nosed wombats (Vombatus ursinus) and an emerging issue in koala and quenda. There are...

Spatially heterogeneous landscape factors such as urbanisation can have substantial effects on the severity and spread of wildlife diseases. However, research linking patterns of pathogen transmission to landscape features remains rare. Using a combination of phylogeographic and machine learning approaches, we tested the influence of landscape and...

10 Pellet feces are generated by a number of animals important to science or agriculture, including 11 mice, rats, goats, and wombats. Understanding the factors that lead to fecal shape may provide 12 a better understanding of animal health and diet. In this combined experimental and theoretical 13 study, we test the hypothesis that the dynamics of...

Interventions against infectious diseases in wildlife are increasingly necessary but remain problematic. Dissimilar to public and domestic animal health, pharmacological interventions (PIs) are rarely used against disease in wildlife populations. However, drugs can combat a range of pathogen types while aligning with positive ethical, epidemiologic...

There are multiple demands for the development of effective and sustainable disease management practices in wildlife, but solutions are widely lacking. In this perspective, we focus on the need to structure research to support advancement toward enhanced wildlife disease control solutions. We concentrate on the need for improved integration between...

Background Sarcoptes scabiei is globally distributed and one of the most impactful mammalian ectoparasites. Sarcoptic mange, caused by infection with S. scabiei , causes disruption of the epidermis and its bacterial microbiota, but its effects on host fungal microbiota and on the microbiota of marsupials in general have not been studied. Here, we (...

Identifying drivers of transmission—especially of emerging pathogens—is a formidable challenge for proactive disease management efforts. While close social interactions can be associated with microbial sharing between individuals, and thereby imply dynamics important for transmission, such associations can be obscured by the influences of factors s...

Microbial changes with sarcoptic mange disease progression in free-ranging BNWs in Tasmania.

Predicting what factors promote or protect populations from infectious disease is a fundamental epidemiological challenge. Social networks, where nodes represent hosts and edges represent direct or indirect contacts between them, are key to quantifying these aspects of infectious disease dynamics. However, understanding the complex relationships be...

Background Sarcoptes scabiei is one of the most impactful mammalian parasites. There has been much research on immunological and clinical pathological changes associated with S. scabiei parasitism across a range of host species. This rich body of literature is complex, and we seek to bring that complexity together in this study. We first (1) synthe...

Sarcoptic scabiei is an invasive parasitic mite that negatively impacts wombats, causing sarcoptic mange disease, characterized by alopecia, intense pruritus, hyperkeratosis, and eventual mortality. Evidence suggests that wombats may be unable to recovery from infection without the assistance of treatments. Transdermal drug delivery is considered t...

We report the physical characteristics of rumpwear in the Australian common ringtail possum, Pseudocheirus peregrinus. Rumpwear presents as varying grades of hair breakage and dermatitis on the lumbosacral region. This condition has been reported in Trichosurus spp. (brushtail possums) previously, but never in P. peregrinus. The etiology remains po...

Rehabilitation of disused mine sites through stabilisation and botanical restoration is ecologically important, but metal transfer pathways to colonising wildlife are often less understood and have never been studied in marsupials. The rehabilitated Royal George tin mine tailings and colonisation by bare-nosed wombats (Vombatus ursinus) represented...

Understanding the spread of pathogens through the environment is critical to a fuller comprehension of disease dynamics. However, many mathematical models of disease dynamics ignore spatial effects. We seek to expand knowledge around the interaction between the bare-nosed wombat (Vombatus ursinus) and sarcoptic mange (etiologic agent Sarcoptes scab...

Most herbivorous mammals have symbiotic microbes living in their gastrointestinal tracts that help with harvesting energy from recalcitrant plant fibre. The bulk of research into these microorganisms has focused on samples collected from faeces, representing the distal region of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. However, the GI tract in herbivorous...

A recent article published in Parasitology Research describes the use of high-dose moxidectin (Cydectin®) by wildlife carers for the treatment of sarcoptic mange in bare-nose wombats (Vombatus ursinus). We provide additional perspectives on this topic, including consideration of the pharmacokinetics, mode of action and efficacy of moxidectin. The v...

Hunting can fundamentally alter wildlife population dynamics but the consequences of hunting on pathogen transmission and evolution remain poorly understood. Here, we present a study that leverages a unique landscape-scale quasi-experiment coupled with pathogen-transmission tracing, network simulation and phylodynamics to provide insights into how...

ContextDisease is increasingly becoming a driver of wildlife population declines and an extinction risk. Vaccines are one of the most successful health interventions in human history, but few have been tested for mitigating wildlife disease. The transmissible cancer, devil facial tumour disease (DFTD), triggered the Tasmanian devil’s (Sarcophilus h...

Some pathogens sustain transmission in multiple different host species, but how this epidemiologically important feat is achieved remains enigmatic. Sarcoptes scabiei is among the most host generalist and successful of mammalian parasites. We synthesize pathogen and host traits that mediate sustained transmission and present cases illustrating thre...

Resource competition is an important interaction that can structure ecological communities, but is difficult to demonstrate in nature, and rarely demonstrated for large mammals including marsupials. We analysed 10 years of population survey data to investigate resource competition between bare-nosed wombats (Vombatus ursinus) and eastern grey kanga...

With thousands of vertebrate species now threatened with extinction, there is an urgent need to understand and mitigate the causes of wildlife collapse. Rails (Aves: Rallidae), being the most extinction-prone bird family globally, and with one-third of extant rail species now threatened or near threatened, are an emphatic case in point. Here, we un...

We introduce a new R package ‘MrIML’ (‘Mister iml’; Multi-response Interpretable Machine Learning). MrIML provides a powerful and interpretable framework that enables users to harness recent advances in machine learning to quantify multi-locus genomic relationships, to identify loci of interest for future landscape genetics studies, and to gain new...

Some of the most important pathogens affecting wildlife are transmitted indirectly via the environment. Yet the environmental stages of pathogens are often poorly understood, relative to infection in the host, making this an important research frontier. Sarcoptic mange is a globally widespread disease caused by the parasitic mite Sarcoptes scabiei....

Background: Sarcoptic mange causes significant animal welfare and occasional conservation concerns for bare-nosed wombats (Vombatus ursinus) throughout their range. To date, in situ chemotherapeutic interventions have involved macrocytic lactones, but their short duration of action and need for frequent re-administration has limited treatment succe...

Some countries have been crippled by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic while others have emerged with few infections and fatalities; the factors underscoring this macro-epidemiological variation is one of the mysteries of this global catastrophe. Variation in immune responses influence SARS-CoV-2 transmission...

Understanding species’ distribution, population trends, and the significance of threatening processes are central to the effective conservation and management of wildlife. The island state of Tasmania, Australia, is home to two of the three extant subspecies of common wombat Vombatus ursinus ursinus and V. u. tasmaniensis, both endemic to the state...

Sarcoptic mange is an infectious disease impacting over 100 mammalian species around the world, including Australia’s common wombat (Vombatus ursinus). A 94% decline in a localised population attributed to mange has raised concerns for the status of the two subspecies endemic to the island state of Tasmania, Australia. We provide the first broad-sc...

Parasite success typically depends on a close relationship with one or more hosts; therefore, attributes of parasitic infection have the potential to provide indirect details of host natural history and are biologically relevant to animal conservation. Characterization of parasite infections has been useful in delineating host populations and has s...

Causative disease and stress agents which manifest as dermatitis in mammals have varying effects on individual animals, from benign irritation and inflammation, to causing morbidity and even mortality. Bacteria, viruses and ectoparasites are all potential causes of dermatitis, and it can be exacerbated by various environmental, genetic and social f...

Hunting can fundamentally alter wildlife population dynamics, but the consequences of hunting on pathogen transmission and evolution remain poorly understood. Here we present a study that leverages a unique landscape-scale experiment coupled with pathogen transmission tracing, network simulation and phylodynamics to provide insights into how huntin...

In this study we evaluate the design and efficacy of Wombot, an exploratory robot used to study environmental conditions within wombat burrows. Our purpose-built robot traverses through the difficult terrain present in wombat burrows whilst facilitating placement and retrieval of environmental data loggers. Our preliminary results suggest that the...

Background Most herbivorous mammals have symbiotic microbes living in their gastrointestinal tracts that help with harvesting energy from recalcitrant plant fibre. The bulk of research into these microorganisms has focused on samples collected from faeces, representing the distal region of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. However, the GI tract in h...

Most herbivorous mammals have symbiotic microbes living in their gastrointestinal tracts that help with harvesting energy from recalcitrant plant fibre. The bulk of research into these microorganisms has focused on samples collected from faeces, representing the distal region of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. However, the GI tract in herbivorous...

Sarcoptic mange, a skin infestation caused by the mite Sarcoptes scabiei, is an emerging disease for some species of wildlife, potentially jeopardizing their welfare and conservation. Sarcoptes scabiei has a near‐global distribution facilitated by its forms of transmission and use of a large diversity of host species (many of those with broad geogr...

Background Statistical models are regularly used in the forecasting and surveillance of infectious diseases to guide public health. Variable selection assists in determining factors associated with disease transmission, however, often overlooked in this process is the evaluation and suitability of the statistical model used in forecasting disease t...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via the original article.

Geographically widespread species present challenges for conservation assessment. We used long‐term spotlight surveys to assess spatiotemporal dynamics of bare‐nosed wombats (Vombatus ursinus), encompassing 34 years of surveys for the Tasmanian mainland sub‐species (V. u. tasmaniensis, 1985–2018) and 25 years for the Flinders Island sub‐species (V....

The bare-nosed wombat (Vombatus ursinus) is a fossorial, herbivorous, Australian marsupial, renowned for its cubic feces. However, the ability of the wombat's soft intestine to sculpt flat faces and sharp corners in feces is poorly understood. In this combined experimental and numerical study, we show one mechanism for the formation of corners in a...

With thousands of vertebrate species now threatened with extinction, there is an urgent need to understand and mitigate the causes of wildlife collapse. As distinct evolutionary clades can follow different routes to endangerment, there is value in taxon-specific analyses when assessing species' vulnerability to threats and identifying gaps in conse...

Identifying drivers of transmission prior to an epidemic - especially of an emerging pathogen - is a formidable challenge for proactive disease management efforts. We tested a novel approach in the Florida panther, hypothesizing that apathogenic feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) transmission could predict transmission dynamics for pathogenic feli...

Background Sarcoptic mange causes significant animal welfare and occasional conservation concerns for bare-nosed wombats ( Vombatus ursinus ) throughout their range. To date, in situ chemotherapeutic interventions have involved macrocytic lactones, but their short duration of action and need for frequent re-administration has limited treatment succ...

Urban expansion can fundamentally alter wildlife movement and gene flow, but how urbanization alters pathogen spread is poorly understood. Here, we combine high resolution host and viral genomic data with landscape variables to examine the context of viral spread in puma ( Puma concolor ) from two contrasting regions: one bounded by the wildland ur...