Parasite and viral species richness of Southeast Asian bats: Fragmentation of area distribution matters

Gay, Noellie; Olival, Kevin J.; Bumrungsri, Sara; Siriaroonrat, Boripat; Bourgarel, Mathieu; Morand, Serge

Our analysis of residual values between sampling effort and parasite and viral richness among bat species can be used to target hosts for cost-effective pathogen discovery and also to identify hosts that have been well sampled for pathogen discovery. The genus Pteropus represents one third of the species with positive residual values, i.e., with greater number of parasite and viral species richness than expected by the linear correlation with sampling effort. However, species of the genus Pteropus represent 40% of all species included in our prioritization analysis and more balanced taxonomic sampling in the future will improve the representativeness of analyses similar to ours. Only a few bat species from SEA were well documented and thus integrated to the analysis (41 for PSR and 33 for viruses). As the number of individual hosts tested is often missing in published papers, the number of publications related to a given parasite in a given host species may be used for future residual analyses. This information has the advantage of being more easily documented and was correlated with PSR in our study.