Using blood meal analysis to study wildlife community-trypanosome-triatomine relationships in anthropogenic landscapes

Anthropogenic land use change is an important driver of disease emergence for vector borne pathogens transmitted between wildlife, domestic animals, and humans. Deforestation, reforestation, urbanization, and agricultural development impact structure and function of wildlife communities, their contact with vectors, and maintenance of pathogens within multi-host communities. Molecular analysis of vector blood meals allows us to understand how vector, pathogen, and the community of wildlife contact networks change as landscape structure changes. We use next-generation sequencing of triatomine blood meals to observe how wildlife-host-triatomine vector contact networks vary across different land use types and analyze how these differences in vector-reservoir-host contact affect Chagas disease transmission dynamics in anthropogenic landscapes of Panama. We show that blood meal taxa, reservoir host-vector contact networks, vector contact with competent and non-competent hosts, and community-scale host life history traits vary across different land use types and help to explain habitat-associated differences or abundance and trypanosome infection in triatomine populations. We also discuss limitations of molecular blood meal analysis and sporadic cross-sectional studies for making inferences on the impact of wildlife community structure on multi-host vector borne pathogen transmission. We suggest that well-designed, long-term longitudinal studies of vector surveillance and vector blood meal analysis will improve 1) understanding of how anthropogenic land use and climate change interact to drive vector-borne multi-host pathogen transmission dynamics at a landscape scale, and 2) identification of potential sylvatic transmission hotspots for improved disease prevention strategies.