In an effort to glean predictive power out of years of research on the effects of forest fragmentation on various species and ecological processes, researchers looked at nine differently fragmented regions of forests located in what is now agricultural landscape just west of Kibale National Park, in the foothills of the Ruwenzori Mountains. Within these regions, they focused on populations of red colobus (Piliocolobus tephrosceles) monkeys and the presence of strongyle and rhabditoid nematodes.
For two years, Thomas R. Gillespie, a professor of pathobiology in the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine, and Colin A. Chapman, an anthropologist at McGill University in Canada, surveyed the monkeys and determined nematode levels by examining 536 colobus fecal samples. Their study appears in the April issue of the journal Conservation Biology.
Gillespie is co-director with Illinois pathobiology colleague Tony Goldberg of the Kibale EcoHealth Project, a flagship program of the multidisciplinary U. of I. Earth and Society Initiative on Emerging Disease & Ecosystem Health.
Red colobus are one of the most endangered African colobine species. The two groups of nematodes have been documented to infect red colobus and have the capacity to cause gastrointestinal problems that can be fatal.
Gillespie and Chapman sorted through nine potential factors, including physical and biological attributes. They concluded that the degradation of the forest and human presence, as measured in stump density, strongly influenced the prevalence of parasitic nematodes. Infection risk, they reported also was higher in the fragme
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Contact: Jim Barlow, Life Sciences Editor
jebarlow@uiuc.edu
217-333-5802
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
6-Apr-2006