Virginie MillienMcGill University | McGill · Redpath Museum
Virginie Millien
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Introduction
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January 2004 - present
Publications
Publications (86)
Background and Aims
Lyme disease is a well‐known occupational risk across North America caused by exposure to Borrelia burgdorferi via blacklegged ticks ( Ixodes scapularis ). As the geographic range of B. burgdorferi advances with the increasing distribution of blacklegged ticks, more outdoor workers are at risk of contracting Lyme disease. In thi...
Aim
A nested pattern (nestedness) in species composition is a frequent signature of insular communities. However, it remains unclear whether the drivers of nestedness are consistent across multiple island systems. Here, we investigated the pattern and drivers of taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic nestedness in terrestrial mammal assemblages fro...
The geographic range of tick populations has expanded in Canada due to climate warming and the associated poleward range shifts of their vertebrate hosts. Abiotic factors, such as temperature, precipitation, and snow, are known to directly affect tick abundance. Yet, biotic factors, such as the abundance and diversity of mammal hosts, may also alte...
With climate and land use changes, tick-borne pathogens are expected to become more widely distributed in Canada. Pathogen spread and transmission in this region is modulated by changes in the abundance and distribution of tick and host populations. Here, we assessed the relationships between pathogens detected in Ixodes scapularis and mammal hosts...
Climate warming combined with intensive human activities are modifying ecosystems globally, and the Arctic biota is shifting substantially faster than the global average, allowing many new species to expand their range poleward. One such species, is the American beaver ( Castor canadensis ), a highly specialized rodent capable of greatly modifying...
Background
Starting in the early 20th century, ticks and their pathogens have been detected during surveillance efforts in Canada. Since then, the geographic spread of tick vectors and tick‐borne pathogens has steadily increased in Canada with the establishment of tick and host populations. Sentinel surveillance in Canada primarily focuses on Ixode...
Used as a communicative tool for risk management, risk maps provide a service to the public, conveying information that can raise risk awareness and encourage mitigation. Several studies have utilized risk maps to determine risks associated with the distribution of Borrelia burgdorferi, the causal agent of Lyme disease in North America and Europe,...
Theory predicts that biodiversity changes due to climate warming can mediate the rate of disease emergence. The mechanisms linking biodiversity-disease relationships have been described both theoretically and empirically but remain poorly understood. We investigated the relations between host diversity and abundance and Lyme disease risk in souther...
Mammals are predicted to vary in body size following Bergmann’s rule, with individuals found at higher latitudes in colder temperatures being larger in size compared to conspecifics occurring at lower latitudes in warmer temperatures. Body size is similarly expected to vary temporally, with a decrease in size through time due to recent climate warm...
Two of the most-studied ecogeographical rules describe patterns of body size variation within species. Bergmann’s rule predicts that individuals have larger body sizes in colder climates (typically at higher latitudes), and the island rule predicts that island populations of small-bodied species average larger in size than their mainland counterpar...
Background: The spread of emerging tick-borne pathogens has steadily increased in Canada with the widespread establishment of tick vectors and vertebrate hosts. At present, Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium causing Lyme disease, is the most common tick-borne pathogen in Canada and primarily transmitted by Ixodes scapularis. A low prevalence of ot...
Aim
Islands have been the test bed of several theories in community ecology, biogeography, and evolutionary biology. Progress within these disciplines has given a more comprehensive and mechanistic understanding of the processes governing variation in species richness among islands. However, it remains unclear whether these same processes also expl...
Rapid climate change is currently altering species distribution ranges. Evaluating the long-term stress level in wild species undergoing range expansion may help better understanding how species cope with the changing environment. Here, we focused on the white-footed mouse ( Peromyscus leucopus ), a widespread small mammal species in North-America...
Identifying genetic variation involved in thermal adaptation is likely to yield insights into how species adapt to different climates. Physiological and behavioural responses associated with overwintering (e.g. torpor) are thought to serve important functions in climate adaptation. In this study, we use two isolated Peromyscus leucopus lineages on...
Habitat loss and fragmentation are considered as the leading drivers of biodiversity loss. The small-island effect (SIE) can be used to predict species extinctions resulting from habitat loss and has important implications for species conservation. However, to date, no study has explicitly evaluated the prevalence of SIEs in habitat islands. Here,...
There are a number of ecogeographical “rules” that describe patterns of geographical variation among organisms. The island rule predicts that populations of larger mammals on islands evolve smaller mean body size than their mainland counterparts, whereas smaller-bodied mammals evolve larger size. Bergmann's rule predicts that populations of a speci...
We studied morphological variation in two closely related and ecologically similar species of mice of the genus Peromyscus, the deer mouse (P. maniculatus) and white-footed mouse (P. leucopus), over the last 50 years in Southern Quebec. We found that contemporary populations of the two species are distinct in morphology and interpret this different...
Genetic diversity may decrease from the centre to the margin of a species distribution range due to neutral stochastic processes. Selection may also alter genetic diversity in non-neutral markers, such as genes associated with the immune system. Both neutral processes and selection on the immune system are thus expected to affect the spatial distri...
Purpose
The white-footed mouse (Peromyscus leucopus) is an important reservoir host for the pathogen responsible for Lyme disease in eastern North-America. Indigenous cases of Lyme disease in southern Quebec have increased from two cases in 2004 to 160 cases in 2015. Because of the strong relationship between the white-footed mouse occurrence and t...
Range expansion has genetic consequences expected to result in differentiated wave-front populations with low genetic variation and potentially introgression from a local species. The northern expansion of Peromyscus leucopus in southern Quebec provides an opportunity to test these predictions using population genomic tools. Our results show eviden...
The nested subset pattern (nestedness) of faunal assemblages has been a research focus in the fields of island biogeography and conservation biology in recent decades. However, relatively few studies have described nestedness in butterfly assemblages in oceanic archipelago systems. Moreover, previous studies often quantified nestedness using inappr...
Microbiome studies generally focus on the gut microbiome, which is composed of a large proportion of commensal bacteria. Here we propose a first analysis of the liver microbiome using next generation sequencing as a tool to detect potentially pathogenic strains. We used Peromyscus leucopus, the main reservoir host species of Lyme disease in eastern...
In some parts of southern Quebec, two closely related rodent species - the white-footed mouse (Peromyscus leucopus) and the deer mouse (P. maniculatus) have recently come in contact due to climate-driven changes in the distribution of the former. Both species share similar morphology, ecology, and life history traits, which suggests that natural hy...
AimThe small-island effect (SIE) has become a widely accepted part of the theoretical framework of island biogeography. A major criticism of SIE studies is the exclusion of empty islands from analyses. However, the generality and underlying factors determining the role of empty islands in generating SIEs remain obscure because few published dataset...
Monitoring and predicting the spread of emerging infectious diseases requires that we understand the mechanisms of range expansion by its vectors. Here, we examined spatial and temporal variation of genetic structure among 13 populations of the Lyme disease vector, the black-legged tick, in southern Quebec, where this tick species is currently expa...
Occurrence of Lyme disease has increased rapidly in Canada in the past 5 years. The emergence of Lyme disease coincides with the range expansion of the primary host, the white-footed mouse (Peromyscus leucopus (Rafinesque, 1818)), in the region. We evaluated the effects of stress level, parasite load, and forest-patch characteristics on P. leucopus...
Zoonotic disease transmission systems involve sets of species interacting with each other and their environment. This complexity impedes development of disease monitoring and control programs that require reliable identification of spatial and biotic variables and mechanisms facilitating disease emergence. To overcome this difficulty, we propose a...
Modification of a species range is one of many consequences of climate change and is driving the emergence of Lyme disease in eastern Canada. The primary reservoir host of the bacteria responsible for Lyme disease, Borrelia burgdorferi, is the white-footed mouse (Peromyscus leucopus), whose range is rapidly shifting north into southern Québec. The...
Population network estimated from 5 mitochondrial genes, for P. leucopus and P. maniculatus.
The colors in the networks correspond to sampling localities. North shore sites are on a grey-scale while south shore sites are in color. Dotted lines correspond to connection probabilities lower than 0.2 while solid lines represent connection probabilities...
Bayesian phylogenetic tree based on the 87 D-Loop sequences of Peromyscus leucopus included in the present study combined with the sequences in Shipp-Pennock et al [20].
To calibrate the molecular clock, the corresponding 43 sequences of Peromyscus maniculatus were used as outgroup, and the split between both species was set at 3.5 Mya. Clades corr...
Bayesian phylogenetic tree based on the 43 Cyt B sequences of Peromyscus maniculatus included in the present study combined with the sequences in Dragoo et al. [20].
To calibrate the molecular clock, the corresponding 87 sequences of Peromyscus leucopus were used as outgroup, and the split between both species was set at 3.5 Mya. Clades correspondi...
Pairwise Fst values (above diagonal) and corresponding probabilities (below diagonal) among the 13 populations of Peromyscus maniculatus sampled in this study.
Significant Fst values are in bold.
(DOCX)
Haplotype network estimated from 5 mitochondrial genes, for P. leucopus and P. maniculatus.
The colors in the networks correspond to sampling localities. North shore sites are on a grey-scale while south shore sites are in color.
(TIF)
Alignments of 43 Peromyscus maniculatus sequences for all mtDNA regions combined.
(TXT)
Pairwise Fst values (above diagonal) and corresponding probabilities (below diagonal) among the 16 populations of Peromyscus leucopus sampled in this study.
Significant Fst values are in bold.
(DOCX)
Phylogeographic trees constructed by neighbor-joining from 5 mitochondrial genes (D-loop, Cyt B, ATP8, 16S and COIII) for P. leucopus and P. maniculatus.
The north-shore (NS) clade is framed in grey and the south-shore (SS) in blue. Boostrap support values are shown for the NS/SS split.
(TIF)
Mismatch distribution analysis for P. leucopus and P. maniculatus based on all markers combined.
Distributions are presented for populations located (a) on both shores, (b) only the north shore, and (c) only the south shore of the St. Lawrence River. Empirical distributions (in blue) and expected distributions under a stable population model (in re...
Alignments of 87 Peromyscus leucopus sequences for all mtDNA regions combined.
(TXT)
Since its discovery in 1975, Lyme disease has spread and increased in much of central and eastern United States. Host diversity is thought to play a role in Lyme disease risk, and it has been suggested that the direction of the relationship between host diversity and disease risk may vary depending on the spatial scale of observation. Here we model...
We evaluated the effect of habitat and landscape characteristics on the population genetic structure of the white-footed mouse. We develop a new approach that uses numerical optimization to define a model that combines site differences and landscape resistance to explain the genetic differentiation between mouse populations inhabiting forest patche...
Figure S1. Current (A) and future (B) predicted abundance (the maximum annual number of feeding female ticks at equilibrium) of the black-legged tick, based on DD > 0.
Figure S2. Probability of presence for the current (A) and future (B) projected distribution of the white-footed mouse, based on climatic variables.
Figure S3. Factor map of the principal component analysis performed on landscape variables.
Table S1. Field data for the 34 field sites.
Different ecological preferences among species may result in differences in response to similar environmental variation. To test this hypothesis, we assessed the patterns of skull and mandible size and shape variation in three Sigmodontinae mice from agroecosystems of central Argentina with increasing degree of specialization: Calomys musculinus, A...
Geographical patterns of morphological variation in small mammals are often associated with environmental factors. The southern red-backed vole Myodes gapperi is a widespread and abundant small mammal in Canada, occurring in environments as diverse as mixed-wood forests and taiga. First upper molars and skulls from nine populations of southern red-...
Lyme borreliosis is rapidly emerging in Canada, and climate change is likely a key driver of the northern spread of the disease in North America. We used field and modeling approaches to predict the risk of occurrence of Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacteria causing Lyme disease in North America. We combined climatic and landscape variables to model t...
Existing and emerging infectious diseases are among the most pressing global threats to biodiversity, food safety and human health. The complex interplay between host, pathogen and environment creates a challenge for conserving species, communities and ecosystem functions, while mediating the many known ecological and socio-economic negative effect...
Climate change is expected to induce many ecological and evolutionary changes. Among these is the hypothesis that climate warming will cause a reduction in body size. This hypothesis stems from Bergmann's rule, a trend whereby species exhibit a smaller body size in warmer climates, and larger body size under colder conditions in endotherms. The mec...
The white-footed mouse (Peromyscus leucopus) is an important reservoir host for Borrelia burgdorferi, the pathogen responsible for Lyme disease, and its distribution is expanding northward. We used an Ecological Niche Factor Analysis to identify the climatic factors associated with the distribution shift of the white-footed mouse over the last 30 y...
Phenotypic differentiation is often interpreted as a result of local adaptation of individuals to their environment. Here, we investigated the skull morphological differentiation in 11 populations of the white-footed mouse (Peromyscus leucopus). These populations were sampled in an agricultural landscape in the Montérégie region (Québec, Canada), a...
The white-footed mouse (Peromyscus leucopus) has expanded its northern limit into southern Qu ebec over the last few decades. P. leucopus is a great disperser and colonizer and is of particular interest because it is considered a primary reservoir for the spirochete bacterium that causes Lyme disease. There is no current information on the gene flo...
Genotyping of Ixodes scapularis Say (Acari: Ixodidae) ticks could enhance understanding of the occurrence and genotypes of I. scapularis-borne pathogens. We investigated the utility of mitochondrial (mt) Cytochrome C Oxidase subunit I gene (cox1) sequences as a tool for understanding the population structure of I. scapularis collected in Canada, wh...
Aim A positive power relationship between maximal body mass and land area has previously been reported of the form Mmax ∝ Area0.5 whilst allometric scaling theory predicts either Mmax ∝ Area1.33 or Mmax ∝ Area1. We provide an analysis of the maximal mass–area relationship for four island systems, to test the hypothesis that community relaxation fol...
Island mammals often display remarkable evolutionary changes in size and morphology. Both theory and empirical data support the hypothesis that island mammals evolve at faster rates than their mainland congeners. It is also often assumed that the island effect is stronger and that evolution is faster on the smallest islands. I used a dataset assemb...
Body size is correlated with virtually every morphological, physiological, and life-history trait in mammal species. As a consequence, estimates of body size of fossil species are often used for paleoecological reconstructions. Characters used as proxies for body mass in extinct species include teeth, skull, and skeletal measurements. We show that...
Body mass in extant rodents covers more than four orders of magnitude, from a few grams up to 40 kg on average in the capybara ( Hydrochaeris hydrochaeris ; [Silva & Downing 1995][1]). However, rodents have been much bigger in the past. The South American fossil rodent, Phoberomys pattersoni ([
Two species of field mice, Apodemus argenteus and A. speciosus, occur in sympatry across the Japanese archipelago. The inter- and intraspecific patterns of morphological differentiation have been evaluated, using a Fourier analysis of the mandible outline. The relative importance of the effect of insular isolation and latitudinal climatic gradient...
The Neogene Gargano paleoisland (southern Italy) has yielded numerous fossil vertebrates, some of them showing extraordinary morphological peculiarities. Among these endemic species, the rodent genus Microtia Freudenthal, 1976, is represented by three main lineages that evolve toward gigantism. This genus is the most significant and abundant rodent...
In PLoS Biology, volume 4, issue 10: DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0040321
The legend to Figure 4 incorrectly identifies the dotted line as representing evolutionary rate and the solid line as representing the size of a morphological character. This identification is reversed in the caption. The dotted line represents the morphological trait's magnitu...
Dramatic evolutionary changes occur in species isolated on islands, but it is not known if the rate of evolution is accelerated on islands relative to the mainland. Based on an extensive review of the literature, I used the fossil record combined with data from living species to test the hypothesis of an accelerated morphological evolution among is...
Table S1 Provides Dataset Used for the Analyses, and Notes Are Given on the Estimation of Time Intervals in Table S1.
(463 KB DOC)
Patterns of ecotypic variation constitute some of the few 'rules' known to modern biology. Here, we examine several well-known ecogeographical rules, especially those pertaining to body size in contemporary, historical and fossil taxa. We review the evidence showing that rules of geographical variation in response to variation in the local environm...
Patterns of ecotypic variation constitute some of the few rules known to modern biology. Here, we examine several well-known ecogeographical rules, especially those pertaining to body size in contemporary, historical and fossil taxa. We review the evidence showing that rules of geographical variation in response to variation in the local environmen...
Aim This paper examines body size variation in both recent and Quaternary populations of the Japanese field mouse Apodemus argenteus in order to assess the relative effects on body size of climate change, isolation and competitive interactions with its congeneric A. speciosus. Both temporal (since the Last Glacial Maximum, LGM) and spatial (over th...
As stated by the island rule, small mammals evolve toward gigantism on islands. In addition they are known to evolve faster than their mainland counterparts. Body size in island mammals may also be influenced by geographical climatic gradients or climatic change through time. We tested the relative effects of climate change and isolation on the siz...
The neogene paleoisland from the area of Gargano, Italy, has yielded numerous fossil vertebrates, some of them showing extraordinary morphological peculiarities due to island evolution. Among them, Microtia (Freudenthal 1976) is the dominant rodent genus in the Gargano palaeofauna and is represented by at least three evolutionary lineages. The inci...
We investigated the geographical patterns of community composition and size structure of murid rodent assemblages in Japan. Rodent faunal composition showed three biogeograpbic zones in the studied area (Hokkaido, northern Honshu and southern Honshu), which are characterized by endemic species or genera. There was a large discrepancy between distri...
Incisors with continuous growth are a characteristic of rodents and fossiliferous deposits contain many of them. No significant sexual dimorphism in lower incisor size was observed among the analyzed samples. Prediction of skeletal measurements and body weight from lower incisor size in extant rodent species are studied. We show here that the lower...
Aim The aim of this paper is to provide a review of the biogeography of the terrestrial mammalian fauna from the Japanese islands.
Location The Japanese archipelago is located off the eastern coast of Asia. It extends over a distance of approximately 2000 km in length, from north to south, and comprises more than 3900 islands of widely differing ar...
We used two different approaches to test for the effect of interspecific competition on community-wide patterns in the size of the upper incisor in six rodent communities. One tests for constancy of size ratios between adjacent species (Barton and David's test), and the other tests for minimum mean size overlap between species pairs (randomization...
Incisors with continuous growth are characteristic of rodents, and microfossil layers contain many of these incisors. For several extant families of rodents, the allometric relationships between the size of the upper incisor and the skull-length, the body-size and the body-mass were quantified, in order to estimate the body-size of fossil rodents....