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Zoonotic diseases, including those carried by mammalian hosts, pose a significant threat to human health worldwide and substantial investment in wildlife disease surveillance is aimed at identifying the risk of spillover from wildlife to human populations where they interact. However, host species diversity is highest in the most intact habitats away from human habitation and most of the potential host species within these habitats are unsampled for infections. This is particularly true in biodiverse tropical ecosystems where the prevalence and identity of infections are the least known. We screened for presence of trypanosomes in 2,335 specimens from 66 species of rodents and shrews sampled from 11 mountain areas on the tropical island of Sulawesi, Indonesia. Our sampling spanned from the edge of human occupation into the most intact forests available on the island with sampling elevations ranging from 220 to 2,700 m. The two most common Trypanosoma species we detected were a native species from the Theileri clade (19.0 % of samples) and an introduced species from the Lewisi clade (5.1 % of murid rodent samples). Both species were detected at all elevations, extending from village edges to mountain peaks, but both reached their highest prevalence above 2,000 m elevation in the most intact forest away from human habitation. If these patterns with trypanosome infections are typical of other zoonotic diseases, wildlife disease surveillance would need to shift resources to study host-pathogen dynamics in more remote ecosystems. Sampling focused on the breadth of biodiversity, such as collected by and housed in natural history collections, is needed to further our understanding of zoonotic diseases and their prevalence. 

Abstract We describe 3 new species of shrews (Eulipotyphla, Soricidae, Crocidura) from West Sumatra, Indonesia. Two of these taxa were found above 1,800 m on Mt. Singgalang. The third taxon was found above 1,660 m on Mt. Talamau, 65 km northwest of Mt. Singgalang. We also resurrect Crocidura aequicauda based on 2 specimens from Mts. Tujuh and Kerinci, which lie near the border between West Sumatra and Jambi provinces. Several methodological approaches support our findings: linear cranial morphometrics, landmark-based 2D geometric morphometrics, and molecular phylogenetics using both mtDNA and 6 nuclear exons. A multilocus species-tree analysis places the 3 new species and C. aequicauda in a clade with the Javan endemics C. monticola and C. umbra. Although the 2 taxa from Mt. Singgalang are recovered as sister species, 1 is nearly twice the size of the other, and they are divergent in several other morphological characters, such as tail length, cranium size, and pelage color and texture. Recently diverged yet morphologically disparate sister taxa living syntopically in an isolated habitat “island,” like the montane forests of Mt. Singgalang, is unusual in mammals but documented in other Crocidura on neighboring Java and Borneo; these 2 new taxa represent the first known case of this phenomenon on Sumatra. Our results bring the number of Sumatran Crocidura to 10, 9 of which are endemic to the island. All 3 of the new species appear to be endemic to a single mountain and were not detected in similar surveys of nearby mountains. If this local endemism pattern is common, it would indicate that Sumatra’s mammal diversity may be severely underestimated, largely due to the paucity of small-mammal surveys and museum specimens. 

Abstract Albinism, a congenital disorder that results in a lack of melanin deposition, is common in domesticated animals but rare in nature. Among the ∼2500 species of rodents worldwide, only 67 have published reports of albinism. Here we report the capture of an albino murid (Muridae: Rodentia) from Mt. Singgalang in West Sumatra, Indonesia. The specimen is an adolescent but sexually mature maleMaxomys hylomyoides, a montane Sumatran endemic. To our knowledge, this specimen represents the first reported albino rodent from Indonesia and Sundaland, and only the second from Southeast Asia.