AI Insight
Human activities such as pollution, habitat transformation, and altered contact networks are reshaping wildlife microbiomes in diverse ways, including symbiont loss, selection for antimicrobial resistance, and shifts toward human-associated microbial communities. However, researchers currently lack understanding of whether these microbial changes are temporary or permanent, beneficial or harmful, and what their consequences are for wildlife health and disease transmission. The article identifies critical knowledge gaps and proposes future research directions to distinguish between different mechanisms driving these microbiome changes, including environmental filtering, dispersal limitation, host responses, and cross-species microbial transmission.
Why it matters
Understanding how human activities alter wildlife microbiomes is essential for predicting disease emergence risks, managing wildlife health in changing environments, and developing conservation strategies that account for the microbial dimension of ecosystem disruption. These insights could inform interventions to protect endangered species and prevent pathogen spillover between wildlife, livestock, and humans.
Understand the Science
by Katherine M. Lagerstrom, Andrew P. Dobson, Shane Campbell-Staton, Andrew H. Moeller
Human activities are transforming ecosystems, but their effects on wildlife microbiota remain poorly understood. Pollution, habitat transformation, and altered host contact networks can reshape host-associated microbiota in context-dependent ways, including through symbiont loss, selection for antimicrobial resistance, shifts toward human-associated community states, and increased among-host variability. Whether these changes are transient or persistent, harmful or adaptive, or consequential for wildlife health and disease risk is largely unknown. This Unsolved Mystery highlights key mechanistic gaps and outlines future research strategies for the field, including studies that distinguish environmental filtering, dispersal limitation, host physiological responses, and cross-species microbial transmission.
Source: How do anthropogenic changes affect wildlife microbiomes?