EAGER: Integrating animal movement ecology and multi-level social networks to investigate zoonotic disease dynamics

EAGER：整合动物运动生态学和多层次社交网络来研究人畜共患疾病动态

• 批准号: 2039769
• 负责人: Karen Mabry
• 金额: $ 30万
• 依托单位: New Mexico State University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2020-09-15 至 2024-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2039769&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: EAGER; Integrating; animal; movement; ecology

This project measures and models movement and social interactions in two bat species and how these behaviors may influence spread of bat coronaviruses, such as SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, among bats and between bats and humans. Zoonotic diseases, such as bubonic plague, Lyme disease, flu, Ebola, rabies, and COVID-19, are caused by pathogens transmitted from animals to people, with devastating effects on humans. Not all potentially zoonotic pathogens will emerge into humans, however, in part because movements of animals and their social interactions with each other and with humans affect the transmission and spread of pathogens. It is, therefore, important to know more about behaviors of animals that are potential sources of zoonotic diseases so that disease dynamics can be better understood and predicted. Viruses will be identified by molecular techniques in bats in the desert southwest of the United States, and the same bats will be followed with GPS trackers and radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags (the same “microchips” used to identify pets) to understand flight patterns when out of their roosts and contacts among bats within roosts (“contact tracing”). The information obtained will be useful for predicting the spread of viruses in bats, and is of relevance to SARS-CoV-2 should it ever “spill back” from people to North American bats. The broader impacts of this work include a collaboration with a local science education group to educate middle-school students about zoonotic diseases and epidemiology. The project will also provide opportunities for training of undergraduate and graduate students at New Mexico State University, a Hispanic-Serving Institution. Research at the intersection of animal movement, social behavior, and disease ecology is key to understanding the dynamics of zoonotic diseases within animal hosts. How animals move through their environments and how they interact with both conspecifics and heterospecifics can influence the transmission and spread of zoonoses. This project will investigate how animal movement and multi-species host social network contacts shape risk of transmission of both endemic coronaviruses and potentially the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 within and among North American bat species. This work is facilitated by ever-smaller animal tracking devices and advances in pathogen detection using genomic techniques, allowing the research team to characterize the movements, social interactions, and “viromes” of individual bats through time. By repeatedly sampling bat viromes, the researchers will determine which viral strains are harbored by individual bats through time. North American bats host multiple coronavirus strains, and there is a risk that SARS-CoV-2 may “spillback” from humans into bats. The researchers will also characterize the movements of individual bats using GPS tracking, and will use contacts among RFID-tagged bats and fluorescent-powder tracking to construct multi-species social networks for bats that share a roost. Integrating the movement and social behavior of bats with their viromes will advance our understanding of within-host dynamics of zoonotic pathogens. Undergraduate and graduate students will be involved in the research, and educational resources targeted to middle schools will help students whose lives have been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic understand the origins of zoonotic diseases and basic concepts in epidemiology.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

该项目衡量了两个蝙蝠物种中的运动和社交互动，以及这些行为如何影响蝙蝠蝙蝠s（例如SARS-COV-2），这是蝙蝠之间以及蝙蝠蝙蝠和人类之间导致Covid-19的病毒。例如鼠疫，莱姆病，流感，埃博拉病毒和库维斯，以及对人类的影响，并非所有可能是人畜共患病原体。重要的是要了解人畜共患病动物的动物，以便使用GPS跟踪器和射频识别（RFID）标签可以更好地预测。 l预测病毒在蝙蝠中的传播，以及与SARS-COV-2相关的，如果这项工作的人的topacts“溢出”包括CATE中学生有关人畜共患病和流行病学的信息。在新墨西哥州的固定型研究生中，西班牙裔疾病的生态是对动物宿主中人畜共患病的关键。物种网络的接触形成了特有冠状病毒的跨性别冠状病毒的风险，并在北美蝙蝠中和北美蝙蝠中可能会促进这种工作单个蝙蝠时间的运动，社交互动和“病毒率”。研究人员将使用GPS跟踪的单个蝙蝠的运动来构建共享栖息的蝙蝠的多物种社交网络。病原体。更广泛的影响审查标准。