EPOW - Ecology Picture of the Week

Links in the Coronavirus Chain

American Mink (Neovison vison), Family Mustelidae
Handaohuza Breeding Center, Heilongjiang Province, China

Explanation:  Staring at us from a tiny cage is an American mink, being bred here in northeast China at a furbearer breeding farm near the town of Hangto, west of the city of Mudanjiang.  

It has become known (see Harrington et al. 2021) that American minks bred in captivity, as in fur farms, are quite susceptible to contracting SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the horrendous pandemic of COVID-19 symptoms.  Minks infected with the coronavirus have been reported from breeding farms in North America and Europe, and the virus is suspected to have been transferred both from humans to minks and from minks to humans.  But even more troubling is that the virus seems to be transmitted from the captive minks to wild minks.

I visited this fur farm in northeast China in 1994, focusing on their holding and breeding of tigers (here is a link to my visit report).  Little did I suspect the potential or future threat of zoonosis or the transfer of viral diseases from these furbearers to humans.  We also visited this fur farm in a previous EPOW episode on the raccoon dogs being bred there that might also serve as viral transmission vectors. The pens at this location, at least back then, also were used for breeding foxes.

Thought possibly to have originated in bats (Conceicao et al. 2020, Zhou et al. 2020), such as flying foxes or fruit bats, the SARS-CoV-2 virus can indeed "chain" through other species as well.  Studies (e.g., Shi et al. 2020) found that ferrets and cats are susceptible to infection, with at least cats being vulnerable to airborne infection, but that dogs, pigs, chickens, and ducks seen to be poor vectors for contracting and transmitting the virus.
  

Furbearer holding pens at the Handaohuza breeding farm
in northeast China.

Information:
     Conceicao, C., N. Thakur, S. Human, J. T. Kelly, L. Logan, D. Bialy, S. Bhat, P. Stevenson-Leggett, A. K. Zagrajek, P. Hollinghurst, M. Varga, C. Tsirigoti, M. Tully, C. Chiu, K. Moffat, A. P. Silesian, J. A. Hammond, H. J. Maier, E. Bickerton, H. Shelton, I. Dietrich, S. C. Graham, and D. Bailey. 2020. The SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein has a broad tropism for mammalian ACE2 proteins. PLOS Biology 18(12):e3001016.
     Gaynor, K. M., J. S. Brashares, G. H. Gregory, D. J. Kurz, K. L. Seto, L. S. Withey, and K. J. Fiorella. 2020. Anticipating the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on wildlife. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 18(10):542-543.
     Harrington, L. A., M. Díez-León, A. Gómez, A. Harrington, D. W. Macdonald, T. Maran, M. Põdra, and S. Roy. 2021. Wild American mink (Neovison vison) may pose a COVID-19 threat. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 19(5):266-267.
     Shi, J., Z. Wen, G. Zhong, H. Yang, C. Wang, B. Huang, R. Liu, X. He, L. Shuai, Z. Sun, Y. Zhao, P. Liu, L. Liang, P. Cui, J. Wang, X. Zhang, Y. Guan, W. Tan, G. Wu, H. Chen, and Z. Bu. 2020. Susceptibility of ferrets, cats, dogs, and other domesticated animals to SARS–coronavirus 2. Science 368(6494):1016-1020.
     Wu, Y.-C., C.-S. Chen, and Y.-J. Chan. 2020. The outbreak of COVID-19: An overview. Journal of the Chinese Medical Association 83(3):217-220.
     Zhou, P., X.-L. Yang, X.-G. Wang, B. Hu, L. Zhang, W. Zhang, H.-R. Si, Y. Zhu, B. Li, C.-L. Huang, H.-D. Chen, J. Chen, Y. Luo, H. Guo, R.-D. Jiang, M.-Q. Liu, Y. Chen, X.-R. Shen, X. Wang, X.-S. Zheng, K. Zhao, Q.-J. Chen, F. Deng, L.-L. Liu, B. Yan, F.-X. Zhan, Y.-Y. Wang, G.-F. Xiao, and Z.-L. Shi. 2020. A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin. Nature 579:270-273.