Many white-tailed deer have malaria

First-ever native malaria in the Americas

Date: February 5, 2016

Source: University of Vermont

Two years ago, Ellen Martinsen, was collecting mosquitoes at the Smithsonian's National Zoo, looking for malaria that might infect birds--when she discovered something strange: a DNA profile, from parasites in the mosquitoes, that she couldn't identify.

By chance, she had discovered a malaria parasite, Plasmodium odocoilei--that infects white-tailed deer. It's the first-ever malaria parasite known to live in a deer species and the only native malaria parasite found in any mammal in North or South America. Though white-tailed deer diseases have been heavily studied--scientist hadn't noticed that many have malaria parasites.

Martinsen and her colleagues estimate that the parasite infects up to twenty-five percent of white-tailed deer along the East Coast of the United States. Their results were published February 5 in Science Advances.

In hiding

"You never know what you're going to find when you're out in nature--and you look," says Martinsen, a research associate at the Smithsonian's Conservation Biology Institute and adjunct faculty in the University of Vermont's biology department. "It's a parasite that has been hidden in the most iconic game animal in the United States. I just stumbled across it."

The new study, led by Martinsen, was a collaboration with scientists at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, the American Museum of Natural History, the National Park Service, the University of Georgia, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee--and UVM biologist and malaria expert Joseph Schall.

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