Quantitative Delineation of Herpesviruses in Bats for use in Ecological Studies

Anna R. Sjodin; Michael R. Willig; Simon J. Anthony

Public health concerns associated with recent and ongoing outbreaks of viruses (e.g., Ebola virus and Zika virus) have motivated researchers to investigate viral diversity in wildlife hosts from previously unexplored perspectives. Ecology has a long history of quantifying the abundance and distribution of organisms and has been increasingly integrated into viral studies (Anthony et al. 2015 , Seabloom et al. 2015 . Traditionally, such efforts have focused on isolated cases of single host-single pathogen relationships (Telfer et al. 2010) . However, infected host individuals generally have multiple pathogens, and infection with one pathogen can affect infection, virulence, or disease emergence of the others (Pedersen and Fenton 2006 , Jolles et al. 2008 , Telfer et al. 2010 , Seabloom et al. 2015 . This suggests that perspectives and approaches from community ecology can complement current methods in virology.