How are environmental changes, loss of biodiversity, and the spread of pathogens connected? The answer is a puzzle. Scientists from Charité—Universitätsmedizin Berlin in cooperation with the Leibniz-IZW have now described one piece of that puzzle in a study on the effects of rainforest clearing on mosquitoes and the viruses they carry in the journal eLife.
Not just may, does. It’s less species to hop to, but smaller genetic pools mean that within a species it’s more likely to spread with less immune response, or has less to mutate against.