Due to recent climatic and land use changes, Canada has experienced changes in tick populations, leading to an increased risk of tick bites and tick-borne pathogen exposure, especially in eastern Canada. Preventative recommendations for companion animals from veterinary professionals include regular use of tick prevention products and tick checks. Tick checks, specifically, should target regions of an animal's body which are deemed to be high risk for tick attachment. However, tick species-specific infestation patterns on dogs and cats are largely understudied, and additional research is needed to help guide targeted tick checks. The objective of this study was to identify tick species-specific infestation patterns on dogs and cats. Ticks were collected for one year (April 2019 -March 2020) from 94 veterinary clinics across Canada as part of the Canadian Pet Tick Survey. All ticks were identified to species, and data on the location of tick attachment were ascertained with each submission. To examine the association between location of attachment (outcome) and tick species (explanatory variable), specifically Ixodes scapularis and Dermacentor variabilis, mixed effects univariable models were built. Two thousand three hundred and six submissions were received from 1925 dogs and 381 cats across Canada. Of these submissions, 1377 comprised Ixodes scapularis, and 620 comprised Dermacentor variabilis. Clear tick species-specific infestation patterns for dogs were present, with I. scapularis being significantly more likely to be found on the shoulders, and D. variabilis more likely to be found on the ears and neck. Dermacentor variabilis was more likely to be found on the cranial aspect of cats' limbs, compared to I. scapularis. Up-to-date information on infestation patterns can be used to inform veterinary professionals and pet owners of common attachment sites based on established ticks in their region and thus conduct targeted tick checks.

AbstractA subspecies of the yellow fever mosquito, Aedes aegypti, has recently evolved to specialize in biting and living alongside humans. It prefers human odor over the odor of nonhuman animals and breeds in human-provided artificial containers rather than the forest tree holes of its ancestors. Here, we report one way this human specialist has adapted to the distinct ecology of human environments. While eggs of the ancestral subspecies rarely hatch in pure water, those of the derived human specialist do so readily. We trace this novel behavior to a shift in how eggs respond to dissolved oxygen, low levels of which may signal food abundance. Moreover, we show that while tree holes are consistently low in dissolved oxygen, artificial containers often have much higher levels. There is thus a concordance between the hatching behavior of each subspecies and the aquatic habitat it uses in the wild. We find this behavioral variation is heritable, with both maternal and zygotic effects. The zygotic effect depends on dissolved oxygen concentration (i.e., a genotype-environment interaction, or G×E), pointing to potential changes in oxygen-sensitive circuits. Together, our results suggest that a shift in hatching response contributed to the pernicious success of this human-specialist mosquito and illustrate how animals may rapidly adapt to human-driven changes in the environment.

Individual animals engaged in collective behaviour can interchange their relative positions on a wide range of time scales. In situations where some regions of the group are more desirable, it is thought that more fit individuals will preferentially occupy the more favourable locations. However, this notion is difficult to test for animal groups like insect swarms that fluctuate rapidly and display little apparent structure. Here, we study the way that individuals in mating swarms of the non-biting midge Chironomus riparius sample the space available to them. We use Voronoi tessellation to define different regions of the swarm in a dynamic way, and show that midges indeed sample the swarm non-uniformly. However, individuals that preferentially reside in the interior or exterior of the swarm do not display statistically distinct flight behaviour, suggesting that differences in fitness must be assessed in a different way. Nevertheless, our results indicate that midge swarms are not random configurations of individuals but rather possess non-trivial internal structure.

Cases of mosquito- and tick-borne diseases are rising worldwide. Repellent products can protect individual users from being infected by such diseases. In a previous study, we identified five essential oils that display long-distance mosquito repellency using a Y-tube olfactometer assay. In the current study, the contact repellent efficacy of 20 active ingredients from the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Minimum Risk Pesticides list were tested using Aedes aegypti and Ixodes scapularis. We utilized an arm-in-cage assay to measure complete protection time from mosquito bites for these active ingredients. To measure tick repellency, we used an EPA-recommended procedure to measure the complete protection time from tick crossings. We found that of the 20 ingredients tested, 10% v/v lotion emulsions with clove oil or cinnamon oil provided the longest protection from both mosquito bites and tick crossings. We conclude that in a 10% v/v emulsion, specific active ingredients from the EPA Minimum Risk Pesticides list can provide complete protection from mosquito bites and tick crossings for longer than one hour.

This study aimed to clarify the differences in ingestive behavior between goats and sheep at the bite scale. Animals were allowed to graze a feeding station of bahiagrass (Paspalum notatum Flügge) with two sward heights (short and tall) to two levels of bite depletion (20 and 40 bites). Ingestive behavior variables, which represent the rate and mass of bites and chews, intake rate, bite dimensions, and bite placement characteristics, were quantified. The interspecies difference in ingestive behavior became obvious at the short sward. Goats reduced the inter-bite distance and maintained bite overlapping but took deeper bites than sheep at the short sward, resulting in slightly greater bite mass. These behavioral changes with efficient chewing may be helpful to maintain the intake rate at the short sward. Sheep maintained their inter-bite distance regardless of the sward height and decreased overlapping bites at the short sward. These behavioral characteristics in sheep in response to sward height may partly compensate for the decrease in the bite mass at the short sward, although it may not always maintain the intake rate. Thus, the present study suggests that goats and sheep implement different bite scale ingestive behaviors, including bite placement, when they eat short swards.

Scorpion sting envenomations (SSE) are feared by the intense pain that they produce in victims. Pain from SSE is triggered mainly by the presence of neurotoxins in the scorpion venom that modulates voltage-gated ion channels. In Brazil, SSE is mostly caused by Tityus serrulatus, popularly known as yellow scorpion. Here, we evaluated experimental spontaneous nociception induced by T. serrulatus venom as well as its isolated neurotoxins Ts1, Ts5, Ts6, Ts8, and Ts19 frag II, evidencing different degrees of pain behavior in mice. In addition, we developed a mice-derived polyclonal antibody targeting Ts5 able to neutralize the effect of this neurotoxin, showing that Ts5 presents epitopes capable of activating the immune response, which decreased considerably the nociception produced by the whole venom. This is the pioneer study to explore nociception using different classes of T. serrulatus neurotoxins on nociception (α-NaTx, β-NaTx, α-KTx, and β-KTx), targeting potassium and sodium voltage-gated channels, besides demonstrating that Ts5 plays an important role in the scorpion sting induced-pain.

Automated monitoring of pigs for timely detection of changes in behavior and the onset of tail biting might enable farmers to take immediate management actions, and thus decrease health and welfare issues on-farm. Our goal was to develop computer vision-based methods to detect tail biting in pigs using a convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract spatial information, combined with secondary networks accounting for temporal information. Two secondary frameworks were utilized, being a long short-term memory (LSTM) network applied to sequences of image features (CNN-LSTM), and a CNN applied to image representations of sequences (CNN-CNN). To achieve our goal, this study aimed to answer the following questions: (a) Can the methods detect tail biting from video recordings of entire pens? (b) Can we utilize principal component analyses (PCA) to reduce the dimensionality of the feature vector and only use relevant principal components (PC)? (c) Is there potential to increase performance in optimizing the threshold for class separation of the predicted probabilities of the outcome? (d) What is the performance of the methods with respect to each other? The study utilized one-hour video recordings of 10 pens with pigs prior to weaning, containing a total of 208 tail-biting events of varying lengths. The pre-trained VGG-16 was used to extract spatial features from the data, which were subsequently pre-processed and divided into train/test sets before input to the LSTM/CNN. The performance of the methods regarding data pre-processing and model building was systematically compared using cross-validation. Final models were run with optimal settings and evaluated on an independent test-set. The proposed methods detected tail biting with a major-mean accuracy (MMA) of 71.3 and 64.7% for the CNN-LSTM and the CNN-CNN network, respectively. Applying PCA and using a limited number of PCs significantly increased the performance of both methods, while optimizing the threshold for class separation did result in a consistent but not significant increase of the performance. Both methods can detect tail biting from video data, but the CNN-LSTM was superior in generalizing when evaluated on new data, i.e., data not used for training the models, compared to the CNN-CNN method.

Flank lesions in pigs are a common yet poorly understood consequence of damaging social behavior. One group of pigs on a commercial farm with group lactation and late weaning, and with the history of flank lesions was studied. Skin lesions on the flanks, including linear and circular lesions, and tail lesions on 69 pigs were recorded six times during 5 weeks after weaning at the age of 9 weeks. Nosing behavior was scanned during six sessions with multiple scans. The associations of age, trunk whiteness, weight gain, sow parity, litter size, sex, and tail lesions with the number of circular and linear lesions were analyzed using linear mixed models. The number of linear lesions increased as pigs aged, and pigs with a higher weight gain had more linear lesions. Moreover, pigs with a whiter trunk color were scored with more lesions of both types. According to descriptive behavior data, nosing and biting behaviors were most frequent during weeks 2-4 after weaning at the age of 11-13 weeks. On average, seven circular flank lesions were found per pig during the experiment, at the age of 10-14 weeks. After the peak on day 17, their occurrence decreased. Skin lesion occurrence was related to a lighter skin color on the trunks of pigs. We recommend reporting skin color in connection with lesion scoring results. Nosing behavior and flank lesions both peaked from 2 to 4 weeks after weaning, suggesting that nosing behavior contributed to lesion development during this time.

Herein, we report three new separate cases of human envenomations by Micrurus hemprichii for the Amazon, which is a biome where envenomations by Micrurus are seldom reported. Two women were bitten after stepping on the snakes and one man was bitten while handling the animal. All cases occurred in the peridomicile, in rural areas. The first case evolved mainly to local symptoms, but the patient was discharged before the identification of the snake and had to be called back for observation before being eventually discharged. In the second case, the patient presented transitory dyspnea and she was discharged after four days in hospital. In the third case, the patient showed only local symptoms, but he was about to receive unnecessary antivenom against coral snakes. Cases like these show the importance of educational problems regarding local venomous snakes in order to avoid bites and to provide the correct hospital treatment. For this, trained professionals in cases involving venomous animals are needed.

Rhabdomyolysis refers to skeletal muscle breakdown causing a release of different intracellular proteins including myoglobin and several electrolytes in the bloodstream. Elevations diagnose rhabdomyolysis in serum creatine kinase. Mass envenomation by multiple wasp stings can cause rhabdomyolysis followed by acute kidney injury, although it is scarce. A 24-year-old male presented to our tertiary centre in an anaphylaxis-like state after multiple wasps sting, rapidly developing rhabdomyolysis followed by acute kidney injury. Despite having an ectopic kidney with a pre-existing renal parenchymal disease, he recovered and was discharged, which in itself is a rare entity of low clinical incidence. Wasp stings can potentially result in serious clinical manifestations, which need to be watched over, assessed and promptly treated.

Automated feeding systems offer numerous advantages for animals and humans, but the associated benefits and risks can often only be seen under practical conditions. The space allowance (~80 cm per horse) at time-controlled hay racks for horses in group housing, unlike at partitioned feeding stands or transponder-controlled feed stations, currently falls below the required individual distance between the horses, which can result in a high level of aggression between the horses due to the lack of partitions between them. Hence, a feed-through at a time-controlled hay rack cannot be equated with a feeding place. In this preliminary study, we therefore aimed to determine the minimum animal-to-feeding-place ratio (AFR) at time-controlled hay racks that would provide adequate individual distances between the horses.

The use of anti-venom is one of the main control measures for snakebite envenoming when applied immediately after the snakebite. Systemic effects of the envenoming are usually reversed; however, neutralization of local effects is hardly achieved. The need for adjuvant therapies associated with serum therapy can improve the treatment for local effects of envenoming, with greater effectiveness in preventing or delaying the progression of damage, reducing the clinical signs and symptoms of victims of snakebites. The purpose of the study was to evaluate the photobiomodulation therapy using LED and/or dexamethasone associated with conventional serum therapy for the treatment of local damage caused by Bothrops atrox envenomation in a murine model. For this, experimental envenoming was carried out in the gastrocnemius muscle of male Swiss mice weighing 18 to 22 g divided into 8 groups of animals, distributed in groups non-treat, treated with anti-bothropic serum, dexamethasone, and LED, or the associated treatments, by intramuscular inoculation of 50 µg of venom or sterile PBS (control). After 30 min, the proposed treatments were administered alone or in combination. After 3 h, blood and muscle samples were collected for myotoxicity, cytotoxicity, histological analysis, and IL-1β assays. The evaluation of the treatment alone showed that serum therapy is not effective for the treatment of local damage and photobiomodulation demonstrated to be an effective therapy to reduce leukocyte infiltration, hemorrhage, and myotoxicity in experimental envenoming; dexamethasone proved to be a good resource for the treatment of the inflammatory process reducing the leukocyte infiltration. The association of serum therapy, LED, and dexamethasone was the best treatment to reduce the local effects caused by Bothrops atrox venom. All in all, the association of photobiomodulation therapy using LED with conventional serum therapy and the anti-inflammatory drug is the best treatment for reducing the undesirable local effects caused by snakebite accidents involving B. atrox species.

Two well characterized tick-borne rickettsioses occur in Brazil. Rickettsia rickettsii caused spotted-fever, transmitted by Amblyomma sculptum and Amblyomma aureolatum, is a severe disease with a high case-fatality rate in the southeastern region of the country. Rickettsia parkeri strain Atlantic rainforest infections transmitted by adult Amblyomma ovale ticks cause a milder non-lethal febrile disease with an eschar (necrosis) at the tick bite site. Clinical diagnosis of rickettsiosis is challenging, particularly during the early stages of the illness when signs and symptoms are non-specific. Since eschar at the tick bite site has emerged as the main clinical feature of mild R. parkeri infections and used to differentiate it from severe R. rickettsii infection, its proper recognition, distinction from other tick bite lesions, and boundaries as a clinical tool must be highlighted. Of importance, eschars induced by Rickettsia must be differentiated from dermatoses caused by other tick-borne skin infections as well from lesions caused by the tick bite itself. We herein highlight information on eschar in rickettsial diseases in Brazil and discuss the need for further research on its clinical relevance and application in the diagnosis of spotted fever caused by R. parkeri strain Atlantic rainforest. In particular, we draw attention to diagnosis of other febrile diseases in the presence of concomitant tick bites.

Horses in stalls generally remain in single-stall housing, so abnormal behavior can be observed in this management condition. Abnormal behavior can harm the horse's keeper, rider, or even the animal itself. The present study aims to examine the effect of goats on abnormal behaviors in horses. For this purpose, it placed six horses and six goats in the single-stall housing of the horses, one horse and one goat, and monitored them for 45 d. The research was divided into three observation phases during this time: in the first observation, the horses were left alone (0-15 d), in the second observation, the horses were left together with the goats (16-30 d), and in the third observation, the horses were left alone again (31-45 d). In the first of these three stages, 12 different abnormal behaviors were detected in horses. The determined hours (00:00-01:00, 06:00-07:00, 07:00-08:00, 19:00-20:00, 20:00-21:00, 23:00-24:00 LT) of the day for abnormal behaviors identified in six different single-stall houses were examined. The frequency of the total abnormal behavior occurring at these hours was evaluated with nonparametric statistical tests. At the end of the research, front feet playing (p = 0.002), crib-biting objects (p < 0.001), and box walking (p < 0.001) behaviors were significantly affected positively by the goats, while there was no statistical difference in other abnormal behaviors (p > 0.05). In conclusion, it can be said that goats positively affect some abnormal behaviors in horses but not others.

Mosquitoes either biologically or mechanically transmit various vector-borne pathogens affecting pigs. Mosquito species display a wide variety of host preference, as well as host attraction and behaviours. Mosquito species attraction rates to- and feeding rates on pigs or other potential hosts, as well as the seasonal abundance of the mosquito species affects their pathogen transmission potential.

Vector-borne disease prevalence is increasing at a time when surveillance capacity in the United States is decreasing. One way to address this surveillance deficiency is to utilize established infrastructure, such as zoological parks, to investigate animal disease outbreaks and improve our epidemiological understanding of vector-borne pathogens. During fall 2020, an outbreak of epizootic hemorrhagic disease (EHD) at the Minnesota Zoo resulted in morbidity and seroconversion of several collection animals. In response to this outbreak, insect surveillance was conducted, and the collected insects were tested for the presence of epizootic hemorrhagic disease virus (EHDV) by RT-qPCR to better understand the local transmitting vector populations responsible for the outbreak. Six pools of Culicoides biting midges were positive for EHDV, including three pools of Culicoides sonorensis, two pools of Culicoides variipennis, and a pool of degraded C. variipennis complex midges. All three endemic serotypes of EHDV (1, 2, and 6) were detected in both animals and midge pools from the premises. Despite this outbreak, no EHDV cases had been reported in wild animals near the zoo. This highlights the importance and utility of using animal holding facilities, such as zoos, as sentinels to better understand the spatio-temporal dynamics of pathogen transmission.

Tick-borne diseases are responsible for many vector-borne diseases within Europe. Recently, novel viruses belonging to a new viral family of the order Bunyavirales were discovered in numerous tick species. In this study, we used metatranscriptomics to detect the virome, including novel viruses, associated with Ixodes ricinus collected from Romania and France. A bunyavirus-like virus related to the Bronnoya virus was identified for the first time in these regions. It presents a high level of amino-acid conservation with Bronnoya-related viruses identified in I. ricinus ticks from Norway and Croatia and with the Ixodes scapularis bunyavirus isolated from a tick cell line in Japan in 2014. Phylogenetic analyses revealed that the Bronnoya viruses' sub-clade is distinct from several Bunyavirales families, suggesting that it could constitute a novel family within the order. To determine if Bronnoya viruses could constitute novel tick-borne arboviruses, a Luciferase immunoprecipitation assay for detecting antibodies in the viral glycoprotein of the Romanian Bronnoya virus was used to screen sera from small ruminants exposed to tick bites. No positive serum was detected, suggesting that this virus is probably not able to infect small ruminants. This study represents the first serological investigation of mammalian infections with a Bronnoya-like virus and an initial step in the identification of potential new emergences of tick-borne arboviruses.

Secreted phospholipases of type A2 (sPLA2s) are proteins of 14-16 kDa present in mammals in different forms and at different body sites. They are involved in lipid transformation processes, and consequently in various immune, inflammatory, and metabolic processes. sPLA2s are also major components of snake venoms, endowed with various toxic and pharmacological properties. The activity of sPLA2s is not limited to the enzymatic one but, through interaction with different types of molecules, they exert other activities that are still little known and explored, both outside and inside the cells, as they can be endocytosed. The aim of this review is to analyze three features of sPLA2s, yet under-explored, knowledge of which could be crucial to understanding the activity of these proteins. The first feature is their disulphide bridge pattern, which has always been considered immutable and necessary for their stability, but which might instead be modulable. The second characteristic is their ability to undergo various post-translational modifications that would control their interaction with other molecules. The third feature is their ability to participate in active molecular condensates both on the surface and within the cell. Finally, the implications of these features in the design of anti-inflammatory drugs are discussed.

Tail biting is an economical and behavioral problem in the pork production system worldwide and systematic tail docking has been applied for decades to decrease the risk of its onset. However, legal and market-driven requirements are leading pig producers to rear undocked animals. The aim of this work was to monitor tail, pluck (lungs, pleurae, and liver), stomach, carcass, and thigh lesions in slaughtering pigs belonging to either docked or undocked batches. A total of 525 batches were evaluated at slaughter: 442 docked and 83 undocked batches. The presence of tail lesions was only recorded in undocked batches (44.0 ± 0.402 vs. 0.2 ± 0.2% compared to docked ones, p < 0.001), with a prevalence of severe chronic lesions of 27.3% ± 0.032, suggesting that more and alternative wide efforts to manage long-tailed animals are needed. On the contrary, docked animals showed more frequent ear lesions (9.6% ± 0.037 vs. 4.6% ± 0.019; p = 0.0001). Severe lung lesions were found more frequently in undocked animals (9.2% ± 0.043 vs. 6.6% ± 0.011, p = 0.006), as well as gastric ulcers (26.1% ± 0.021 vs. 20.3% ± 0.37, p = 0.006). These lesions might share the same predisposing factors of tail lesions; the latter might be investigated as an iceberg indicator for other pathological conditions in undocked pigs and eventual causal association among lesions in these organs should be explored.

Patients bitten by Protobothrops mucrosquamatus, Viridovipera stejnegeri, and Naja atra develop different degrees of wound infection. This study validated BITE and Cobra BITE scoring systems that we established previously. Bacteriological studies of patients with wound infection were conducted. The operating characteristic curves and area under the curve (AUC) and wound infection rates were compared between the derivation set (our previous study patient population) and the validation set (new patient cohorts enrolled between June 2017 and May 2021). No significant differences in the AUC for both the BITE (0.84 vs. 0.78, p = 0.27) and Cobra BITE (0.88 vs. 0.75, p = 0.21) scoring systems were observed between the derivation and validation sets. Morganella morganii and Enterococcus faecalis were the two most commonly detected bacteria in the microbiological study. More bacterial species were cultured from N. atra-infected wounds. Antibiotics such as amoxicillin with clavulanic acid, oxacillin, and ampicillin may not be suitable for treating patients with P. mucrosquamatus, V. stejnegeri, and N. atra bites in Taiwan. Carbapenem, third-generation cephalosporins, and fluoroquinolone may be superior alternatives.

Snake venoms are complex mixtures of toxins that differ on interspecific (between species) and intraspecific (within species) levels. Whether venom variation within a group of closely related species is explained by the presence, absence and/or relative abundances of venom toxins remains largely unknown. Taipans (Oxyuranus spp.) and brown snakes (Pseudonaja spp.) represent medically relevant species of snakes across the Australasian region and provide an excellent model clade for studying interspecific and intraspecific venom variation. Using liquid chromatography with ultraviolet and mass spectrometry detection, we analyzed a total of 31 venoms covering all species of this monophyletic clade, including widespread localities. Our results reveal major interspecific and intraspecific venom variation in Oxyuranus and Pseudonaja species, partially corresponding with their geographical regions and phylogenetic relationships. This extensive venom variability is generated by a combination of the absence/presence and differential abundance of venom toxins. Our study highlights that venom systems can be highly dynamical on the interspecific and intraspecific levels and underscores that the rapid toxin evolvability potentially causes major impacts on neglected tropical snakebites.