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2016 Katma Award |
The Cooper Ornithological Society is pleased to present the 2016 KatmaAward to Drs. Muhammad Asghar, Infectious Disease Unit, Department of Medicine Solna, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden, Dennis Hasselquist, Department of Biology, Lund University, Lund, Sweden, Bengt Hansson, Department of Biology, Lund University, Pavel Zehtindjiev, Institute of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria, Helena Westerdahl, Department of Biology, Lund University, Staffan Bensch, Department of Biology, Lund University, for their paper “Hidden costs of infection:Chronic malaria accelerates telomere degradation and senescence in wild birds” which appeared in 2015 in Science (347:436–438).
The name KATMA, as derived from the Greek root kat meaning
“against” for theories that are proposed to replace current dogma, or settled
opinion. Serious work that questions current dogma too often is stifled by
those who are angered by seeing their own work questioned. Great katmatists
like Galileo and Darwin are heroes of science. A full explanation of the Katma
Award was published in 2003, Volume 105(4):843 of The Condor.
For decades, ornithologists have recognized that parasites and the
disease they cause are an important evolutionary force. For instance, the
bright feather coloration of birds is proposed to evolve in response to parasites,
and parasites can shape the ranges of birds.With so much focus on avian disease
and such a broad foundation of knowledge regarding how parasites interact with
birds, the data and insights presented in “Hidden costs of infection: Chronic
malaria accelerates telomere degradation and senescence in wild birds” by
Asghar, Hasselquist, Hansson, Zehtindjiev, Westerdahl, and Bensch are startling
in their novelty and implications. These authors analyzed life-history
data from a long-term study of Great Reed Warblers (Acrocephalus
arundinaceus) in Sweden including in particular the fitness costs of
infection by the protozoan parasites Plasmodium and Haemoproteus
spp. (hereafter malaria infection). A large proportion of bird populations on
Earth deal with malaria infections, so the implications of such a study are
potentially far-reaching.The results reported by Asghar et al. challenge
conventional thinking that low-level, chronic malarial infections in birds have
no fitness consequences. Asghar et al. found that low-level infection by
malarial parasites caused significant negative effects on reproduction and
longevity.Moreover, they presented data that the mechanism by which malarial
infection impacted survival and reproduction was through negative effects on
telomeres, the nucleoprotein structures that cap the ends of chromosomes. The
2016 Katma award is bestowed upon Asghar et al. for the novel approaches taken
in the study of subtle effects avian malaria on songbirds. It is a study that
challenges conventional thinking regarding the fitness consequences of
low-level parasite infections with large implications for avian life history
theory.
