Authors

Discussion

Agricultural expansion in Southeast Asia has converted most natural landscapes into mosaics of forest interspersed with plantations, dominated by the presence of generalist species that benefit from resource predictability. Dietary shifts resulting from these adaptations can alter the structure of host parasite communities and ultimately impact the fitness and survival of their populations. Our study focuses on the Asian water monitor lizard (Varanus salvator), one of the largest predators in Asian wetlands, as a model species to understand the health consequences of dietary shifts in an oil palm dominated landscape in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo. We evaluated the influence of diet diversity on the parasite species richness and prevalence of lizards living in forest patches and oil palm plantation estates. We observed that lizards feeding on less diverse diets, mostly dominated by rodents in oil palm plantations, hosted less diverse parasite communities with overall higher parasite prevalence. However, parasites with complex transmission modes, such as cestodes and trematodes, were more prevalent in forested areas. By working with a widely distributed generalist carnivore as model species, we outline how human-dominated landscapes can pose a negative effect on wildlife species whose diet may be altered by the influence of human activities, such as farming and extensive agriculture.