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Updated: Aug 29, 2025
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Tick Microbiome Characterization by Next-Generation 16S rRNA Amplicon Sequencing
Published on: August 25, 2018
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Environmental factors driving fine-scale ixodid tick abundance patterns.
Alfonso Peralbo-Moreno1, Sara Baz-Flores1, Raúl Cuadrado-Matías1
1Instituto de Investigación en Recursos Cinegéticos (IREC), CSIC-UCLM-JCCM, Ciudad Real, Spain.
The Science of the Total Environment
|September 9, 2022
Summary
Understanding tick abundance is key to managing tick-borne diseases. This study reveals tick populations are influenced by environment, host, and land use, identifying key hotspots for transmission control.
Area of Science:
- Ecology and Environmental Science
- Veterinary Entomology
- Disease Ecology
Background:
- Tick abundance is crucial for assessing tick-borne pathogen transmission risks.
- Understanding tick abundance determinants at small spatial scales is limited, especially in Mediterranean environments.
- This knowledge gap hinders the development of effective tick control strategies.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the drivers of tick abundance in a Mediterranean ecosystem.
- To inform the development of novel tick management strategies.
- To model tick burdens on wild ungulates considering environmental, host, and land-use factors.
Main Methods:
- Estimated tick burdens on 1965 wild ungulates (Rhipicephalus annulatus, Hyalomma lusitanicum, Ixodes ricinus) in Doñana National Park, Spain (2010-2020).
- Utilized generalized linear mixed models with a zero-inflated negative binomial distribution.
- Employed deviance partitioning and niche overlap analysis (environmental principal component analysis) to assess factor contributions and species similarities.
Main Results:
- Tick abundance is jointly driven by multiple factors: environment, host population, host individual, and land-use.
- Host aggregation areas with favorable environmental traits for ticks represent significant transmission hotspots.
- No significant niche differentiation was observed among the three studied tick species, indicating similar dependencies.
Conclusions:
- Tick demography is a complex multifactorial issue, even at fine spatial scales.
- Identifying tick and vector-borne pathogen transmission hotspots is feasible by analyzing host aggregation and environmental suitability.
- Findings provide a basis for designing targeted strategies to mitigate tick parasitism impacts.
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