Quantitative Delineation of Herpesviruses in Bats for use in Ecological Studies

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

Another advantage to studying herpesviruses from an ecological context is that this viral family often exists at high prevalence levels (Cone et al. 1993 , Kidd et al. 1996 , Cortez et al. 2008 , Imbronito et al. 2008 , Tenorio de Franca et al. 2012 , Phalen et al. 2017 , Tazikeh et al. 2019 . While some surveys (e.g. Cone et al. 1993 , Kidd et al. 1996 , Phalen et al. 2017 show Generally, herpesviruses are highly host specific, but when host-virus relationships are examined at an evolutionary timescale, host switching has been the norm (Escalera-Zamudio et al. 2016 , Azab et al. 2018 . As such, we expected herpesviruses that infected multiple host species to have core hosts. Overall, we found evidence of host sharing among bat species at Mata de Plátano Nature Reserve, regardless of cave. The existence of host sharing is further supported by viral prevalence and viral discovery curves. A higher prevalence at the populationlevel (i.e. a single species) than the community-level, as seen here (Table 2) , is consistent with host-specificity. Also, at the largest scale (i.e. the entire nature reserve), sampling completeness reached 80%. This is in contrast to accumulation curves for viral metacommunities infecting particular host populations, which were as low as 55% (P. quadridens). This suggests that undiscovered OTUs at the scale of host population have already been discovered at the scale of nature reserve (i.e. have already been discovered in another host species). This supports the hypothesis that certain OTUs that are common in a core host are rare in all other host species.