First report of Enterocytozoon bieneusi and Cryptosporidium spp. in peafowl (Pavo cristatus) in China

Feng, Sheng-Yong; Chang, Han; Luo, Jing; Huang, Jing-Jing; He, Hong-Xuan

In our study, we detected, for the first time, the prevalence (6.59%) of E. bieneusi in peafowl, which was similar to some studies performed in other birds (Bart et al., 2008; Lallo et al., 2012; Pirestani et al., 2013) . In contrast to our result, much higher prevalence was found in studies conducted by Li et al. (2014) in chicken, Lobo et al. (2006) (Nakamura and Meireles, 2015) . In China, Cryptosporidium spp. has been reported in ruddy shelduck (Amer et al., 2010) , quails (Wang et al., 2012) , ostriches , domestic pigeons (Li et al., 2015) , parrots , Java sparrows (Yao et al., 2017) and chickens (Liao et al., 2018) . In the present study, we first detected the prevalence of Cryptosporidium spp. in peafowl in China. In Beijing, the infection rate was 4.58%, while in Jiangxi Province, the infection rate was 9.52%. This differences may be caused by climatic conditions, management level and differences in age composition of peafowl in the two locations. To our knowledge, there is no other reports on Cryptosporidium spp. infection in peafowl other than studies conducted by Nakamura et al. (2009) . In studies performed in other birds elsewhere, infection rates of Cryptosporidium spp. vary from 0.82% to 43.9% (Baroudi et al., 2013; Li et al., 2015a; Maca and Pavlasek, 2015) . Though infection rate varies with geographical location, avian species and detection methods, the number of samples may also be the causation of the differences. Moreover, different hosts are unequally susceptible to various genotypes of the parasites, which may also be responsible for the difference in infection rates. In addition, higher prevalence of E. bieneusi and Cryptosporidium spp. in the adolescent peafowl might be caused by their naive immune status.