Eurasian lynx

Holland, Celia V., 2023, A walk on the wild side: A review of the epidemiology of Toxocara canis and Toxocara cati in wild hosts, International Journal for Parasitology: Parasites and Wildlife 22, pp. 216-228 : 221-222

3.1. Eurasian lynx ( Lynx lynx )

The felid species that has received the most attention in the published literature is the Eurasian lynx ( Lynx lynx ). There are four species of the genus Lynx Kerr, 1792 : two in America, L. canadensis Kerr, 1792 and L. rufus (Schreber, 1777) , one Euro-Asiatic, L. lynx (Linnaeus, 1758) , and one species endemic to the Iberian Peninsula, L. pardinus (Temminck, 1827; Wilson and Reeder, 1993). The Iberian lynx is considered to be one of the most threatened Felidae species in the world ( Figueiredo et al., 2021) and only three studies on T. cati in this species are described in Table 6.

Studies on L. lynx from 7 countries have revealed that most prevalence values of T. cati are high compared with other Lynx species and particularly so in Finland ( Table 6). Average abundance values are also high with mean values of 18 worms/host in Finland and 17 in Estonia and Poland respectively. Data on the diet of lynx from Poland have identified rodents as a common prey item (Schmidt, 2008).

The history of the Eurasian lynx population in Finland has provided an opportunity to study the potential effects of a dramatic population increase and expansion of a solitary apex predator on their parasite prevalence and abundance. The extensive study of Finnish lynx by Virta et al. (2022) that was conducted between 1999 and 2015, reported worm burdens that ranged from 1 to 218 worms/host with a k value of 0.513 indicating significant aggregation. This study concluded that despite considerable increases in the lynx population over the period of

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the study, T. cati prevalence did not vary significantly between years nor by lynx density, and that abundance was not dependent on lynx population density either. The authors acknowledge the lack of information concerning the extent of environmental contamination and the level of T. cati infection in paratenic hosts in Finland as explanatory variables, while highlighting the potential contribution from domestic cats (see for example N¨areaho et al., 2012). Importantly, they emphasise that the role of free-ranging wildlife species in the maintenance of zoonotic pathogens should not be forgotten in One Health investigations.