The golden jackal Canis aureus occurs in south-eastern Europe, Asia, the Middle East, the Caucasus, and Africa. In Serbia, jackals neared extinction; however, during the last 30 years, the species started to spread quickly and to increase in number. Few studies in the past have revealed their potential role as carriers of zoonotic diseases. Animal samples were collected over a three-year period...

(pets, farm cats, etc) and, therefore, the infection risk is usually unknown. Other wildlife species are numerically of no importance as final hosts in Europe: the raccoon dog (Nyctereutes procyonoides), an accidentally introduced caniid from East Asia was recently confirmed as a natural host of E. multilocularis in Germany. The wolf (Canis lupus), lynx (Lynx spp) and wild cat (Felis sylvestris...

Decline in wild populations as a result of anthropogenic impact is widely considered to have evolutionary consequences for the species concerned. Here we examine changes in developmental stability in the painted hunting dog (Lycaon pictus), which once occupied most of sub-Saharan Africa but has undergone a dramatic population decline in the last century. Fluctuating asymmetry (FA) was used as a...

Serengeti lions frequently experience viral outbreaks. In 1994, one-third of Serengeti lions died from canine distemper virus (CDV). Based on the limited epidemiological data available from this period, it has been unclear whether the 1994 outbreak was propagated by lion-to-lion transmission alone or involved multiple introductions from other sympatric carnivore species. More broadly, we do not...

We present the first community-level study of the associations of both roads and other human disturbances with the distribution of mammals in Gabon (central Africa). Our study site was in an oil concession within a littoral mosaic landscape. We conducted surveys along 199 line transects and installed camera traps on 99 of these transects to document mammal presence and abundance. We used genera...

How Monkeys See The World by Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth (1990) is the result of many years of close observational research on vervet monkeys in Africa. Vervets are members of the Family Cercopithecidae who are monkeys who live in Africa and Asia. They are more closely related to apes and hominoids than are New World Monkeys, as their line and the hominoids diverged after the New World M...

Nucleic acid sequence analysis was used to determine the phylogenetic relationships amongst rabies viruses isolated from typical canid hosts such as bat-eared fox, jackal and dog in South Africa (SA). Geographical factors were taken into account in the selection of isolates and three different regions within the genomes of the isolates were compared for their use as phylogenetic indicators. The...