| prevalence and abundance of fleas in black-tailed prairie dog burrows: implications for the transmission of plague (yersinia pestis). | plague, the disease caused by the bacterium yersinia pestis, can have devastating impacts on north american wildlife. epizootics, or die-offs, in prairie dogs (cynomys ludovicianus) occur sporadically and fleas (siphonaptera) are probably important in the disease's transmission and possibly as maintenance hosts of y. pestis between epizootics. we monitored changes in flea abundance in prairie dog burrows in response to precipitation, temperature, and plague activity in shortgrass steppe in north ... | 2008 | 18605787 |
| transmission efficiency of two flea species (oropsylla tuberculata cynomuris and oropsylla hirsuta) involved in plague epizootics among prairie dogs. | plague, caused by yersinia pestis, is an exotic disease in north america circulating predominantly in wild populations of rodents and their fleas. black-tailed prairie dogs (cynomys ludovicianus) are highly susceptible to infection, often experiencing mortality of nearly all individuals in a town as a result of plague. the fleas of black-tailed prairie dogs are oropsylla tuberculata cynomuris and oropsylla hirsuta. we tested the efficiency of o. tuberculata cynomuris to transmit y. pestis daily ... | 2008 | 18787922 |
| evidence for the involvement of an alternate rodent host in the dynamics of introduced plague in prairie dogs. | 1. the introduction of plague to north america is a significant threat to colonies of prairie dogs (cynomys ludovicianus), a species of conservation concern in the great plains. other small rodents are exposed to the causative agent, yersinia pestis, during or after epizootics; yet, its effect on these rodents is not known, and their role in transmitting and maintaining plague in the absence of prairie dogs remains unclear. 2. we live-trapped small rodents and collected their fleas on 11 colonie ... | 2009 | 19302321 |
| flea abundance on black-tailed prairie dogs (cynomys ludovicianus) increases during plague epizootics. | black-tailed prairie dogs (cynomys ludovicianus) on the great plains of the united states are highly susceptible to plague, caused by the bacterium yersinia pestis, with mortality on towns during plague epizootics often approaching 100%. the ability of flea-borne transmission to sustain disease spread has been questioned because of inefficiency of flea vectors. however, even with low individual efficiency, overall transmission can be increased if flea abundance (the number of fleas on hosts) inc ... | 2009 | 19492944 |
| inferring host-parasite relationships using stable isotopes: implications for disease transmission and host specificity. | identifying the roles of different hosts and vectors is a major challenge in the study of the ecology of diseases caused by multi-host pathogens. intensive field studies suggested that grasshopper mice (onychomys leucogaster) help spread the bacterium that causes plague (yersinia pestis) in prairie dog colonies by sharing fleas with prairie dogs (cynomys ludovicianus); yet conclusive evidence that prairie dog fleas (oropsylla hirsuta) feed on grasshopper mice is lacking. using stable nitrogen is ... | 2009 | 19967881 |
| population genetic structure of the prairie dog flea and plague vector, oropsylla hirsuta. | oropsylla hirsuta is the primary flea of the black-tailed prairie dog and is a vector of the plague bacterium, yersinia pestis. we examined the population genetic structure of o. hirsuta fleas collected from 11 prairie dog colonies, 7 of which had experienced a plague-associated die-off in 1994. in a sample of 332 o. hirsuta collected from 226 host individuals, we detected 24 unique haplotype sequences in a 480 nucleotide segment of the cytochrome oxidase ii gene. we found significant overall po ... | 2011 | 20696095 |