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Hi! I am Marie and I made this website to present to you my professional practice supervised by Katie O'Dwyer from the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology (GMIT). Normally the topic of my internship was about parasite detection and quantification in a variety of marine species. However, a "Chinese" virus crossed our path and made me change plans. The new topic on which I worked on has the name "The range of parasites that is hosted by seabirds." For this new internship I had to make a database which represents the species richness and prevalence of parasite species in seabirds. This database contains information of 19 papers. I am very happy to present to you my payoff after six weeks of work!
Picture taken by Mafalda Isidro at Bredene Beach
You are probably wondering: "Why make a database about parasites?" or "Why did that girl just randomly insert a video about the problems facing cute puffins?". Well the answer is quite simple: species richness and prevalence of parasites are associated with foraging habits of seabirds. For example, puffin chicks who manage to survive in these harsh conditions will have a different parasite community than chicks who are living in healthy nests. Parasites tell us more about how seabirds are feeding themself and their diet is often influenced by human impacts like fisheries and climate change. This means that by assessing parasites in seabird communities, you can know more about seabirds prey and how communities might evolve in the future because of their changing diet. Another example is the parasite Parorchites zederi which can be found in Antarctic penguins. I wrote a blog about this tapeworm in "Parasite of the day" and you can find the article with the link https://dailyparasite.blogspot.com/
Methodology Database
Methodology Database
INFORMATION IN THE DATABASE
INFORMATION IN THE DATABASE
Prevalence (= Percentage of Birds infected by Parasites)
Parasite Species Richness (= Total Number of Parasite Species)
Taxonomy Seabird
Taxonomy Parasite
Sample size (= Total Number of Seabirds examined during the study)
Sampling Method
Sex Seabird
Life Stage Seabird
....
Bird Families in the Database
Bird Families in the Database
Sulidae - Gannets and Boobies
Phalacrocoracidae - Cormorants
Scolopacidae - Sandpipers
Laridae - Gulls
Alcidae - Auks
Procellariidae - Petrels
Anatidae - Eiders
Spheniscidae - Penguins
Examples comparitive analysis
Examples comparitive analysis
With this database, a review paper can be made or present scientists can compare their results with previous gained information. Although it was not my task to do comparitive analysis, I have decided to include some graphs for this website to show you how the database can be implemented in research. below you can find some examples that visualize the obtained data and compare the results of the 19 papers.
This figure is a phylogenetic tree. Phylogenetic trees are a representation of how closely species are related to each other. For this example, Sulidae (Gannets and boobies) are more closely related to Phalacrocoracidae (Cormorants) than they are to Spheniscidae (Penguins). However, this tree needs to be corrected since there are polytomies (more than two branches for one branch) present. This happens by searching through the literature and finding specific relationships.
In this boxplot, you can see the overall prevalence and the horizontal line within the boxes represent the mean prevalence per bird family. This graph however, is not that well represented since many papers only discussed the prevalence per species of parasites. Therefore, I often had to use the prevalence of the most common parasite species found for my database. This causes an underestimation of the overall parasite prevalence in some bird families, especially in the bird family Laridae (Gulls) and Alcidae (Auks). It shows how much information lacks in this field of study.
This boxplot is a better representation of all the papers collected. Surprisingly, the gulls, Laridae, don't count the most number of species of parasites in seabirds. The highest parasite species richness is accounted for the bird family Scolopacidae, the Sandpipers. The lowest parasite species richness is for the Spheniscidae, the Penguins.
Conclusion
Conclusion
I learned a lot while making this database. Papers often lack a lot of information and it's up to us to decrease the knowledge gap. We must obtain as much data as we possibly can, because data can serve as proof in convincing governances to implement regulations on environmental well-being. I would like to thank the IMBRSea program and GMIT for giving me this opportunity and Katie O'Dwyer who gave me a lot of advice and support during these six weeks. Thank you too for visiting my website and I hope you all enjoyed.
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