Date: November 2, 2015
Source: Washington University in St. Louis
Many
people remember the arrival of West Nile in North America in 1999, if only
because the initial outbreak killed not just wild crows but also exotic birds
in the Bronx Zoo.
In
the following years, a trail of dead crows marked the spread of the virus from
the East through the Midwest on to the West Coast. It took only four years for
the introduced virus to span the continent.
But
what happened to bird populations in the wake of the virus's advance? Were some
species decimated and others left untouched? After the initial die-off were the
remaining birds immune, or mown down by successive waves of the disease? Nobody
really knew.
Now,
a study published in the Nov. 2 issue of Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences provides some answers. The study, a collaboration
among scientists at Colorado State University, the University of California at
Los Angeles, Washington University in St. Louis and the Institute for Bird
Populations (IBP), is the first to fully document the demographic impacts of
West Nile virus on North American bird populations.
The
scientists analyzed 16 years of mark-recapture data collected at more than 500
bird-banding stations operated using the Monitoring Avian Productivity and
Survival protocol developed by IBP, a California-based nonprofit that studies
declines in bird populations.
No comments:
Post a Comment