ArticleEcology and evolution2016
Do not feed the wildlife: associations between garbage use, aggression, and disease in banded mongooses (Mungos mungo).
Article in Ecology and evolution, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 33 citations in OpenAlex.
- The impact of urbanisation on social behaviour: a comprehensive review.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Pooled it
- City lizards are more social.Biology letters · 2025Article
- Food availability leads to more connected contact networks among peridomestic zoonotic reservoir hosts.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- A framework for integrating inferred movement behavior into disease risk models.Movement ecology · 2022Article
- Urban landscapes increase dispersal, gene flow, and pathogen transmission potential in banded mongoose (Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Characteristics of urban environments and novel problem-solving performance in Eurasian red squirrels.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Bidirectional interactions between host social behaviour and parasites arise through ecological and evolutionary processes.Parasitology · 2021Article
- Behavioral Causes, Ecological Consequences, and Management Challenges Associated with Wildlife Foraging in Human-Modified Landscapes.Bioscience · 2021Article
- Infectious disease and sickness behaviour: tumour progression affects interaction patterns and social network structure in wild Tasmanian devils.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Effect of food limitation and reproductive activity on fecal glucocorticoid metabolite levels in banded mongooses.BMC ecology · 2020Article
- Assessing the contributions of intraspecific and environmental sources of infection in urban wildlife: Salmonella enterica and white ibis as a case study.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2018Article
- Assessing the direct and indirect effects of food provisioning and nutrient enrichment on wildlife infectious disease dynamics.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Review
- Enhanced access to anthropogenic food waste is related to hyperglycemia in raccoons (Conservation physiology · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Urbanization and other human modifications of the landscape may indirectly affect disease dynamics by altering host behavior in ways that influence pathogen transmission. Few opportunities arise to investigate behaviorally mediated effects of human habitat modification in natural host-pathogen systems, but we provide a potential example of this phenomenon in banded mongooses (Mungos mungo), a social mammal. Our banded mongoose study population in Botswana is endemically infected with a novel Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex pathogen, M. mungi, that primarily invades the mongoose host through the nasal planum and breaks in the skin. In this system, several study troops have access to human garbage sites and other modified landscapes for foraging. Banded mongooses in our study site (N = 4 troops, ~130 individuals) had significantly higher within-troop aggression levels when foraging in garbage compared to other foraging habitats. Second, monthly rates of aggression were a significant predictor of monthly number of injuries in troops. Finally, injured individuals had a 75% incidence of clinical tuberculosis (TB) compared to a 0% incidence in visibly uninjured mongooses during the study period. Our data suggest that mongoose troops that forage in garbage may be at greater risk of acquiring TB by incurring injuries that may allow for pathogen invasion. Our study suggests the need to consider the indirect effects of garbage on behavior and wildlife health when developing waste management approaches in human-modified areas.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.