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Ectoparasite reproductive performance when host condition varies

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Abstract

Host condition can influence both the nutritive resources available to parasites and the strength of host defences. Since these factors are likely to be correlated, it is unclear whether parasites would be more successful on hosts in good, intermediate or poor conditions. For more complex parasites, like fleas, where larvae depend on adults to extract and make available some essential host resources, host condition can act at two levels. First, it can affect the investment of females into eggs, and second, it can influence offspring growth. In a two-step experiment, we first let female hen fleas Ceratophyllus gallinae feed on nestlings of reduced, control or enlarged great tit Parus major broods and secondly used the blood from these nestlings as a food source for flea larvae reared in the laboratory. We then assessed the effect of brood size manipulation on reproductive investment and survival of female fleas, and on survival, developmental time, mass and size of pre-imago larvae and adults of the first generation. Although host condition, measured as body mass controlled for body size, was significantly influenced by brood size manipulation, it did not affect the female fleas' reproductive investment and survival. Larvae fed with blood from nestlings of reduced broods lived longer, however, than larvae fed on blood from enlarged or control broods. Additionally, F1 adults grew shorter tibiae when their mother had fed on hosts of reduced broods. The finding that brood size manipulation influenced parasite reproduction suggests that it affected nutritive resources and/or host defence, but the precise mechanism or balance between the two requires further investigation.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to V. Saladin for molecular sexing of nestlings and to M. Coslovsky and M. Rueesch for helpful comments on the manuscript. We also wish to thank M. Coslovsky for kindly allowing us to use his nest boxes. The work was approved by the veterinary office of the Canton Berne, Switzerland (permit number 22/10) and financially supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant number 3100A0-122566/1).

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  1. Institute for Ecology and Evolution, University of Bern, Baltzerstrasse 6, 3012, Bern, Switzerland

    Shona Rueesch, Mélissa Lemoine & Heinz Richner

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  1. Shona Rueesch
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Correspondence to Shona Rueesch.

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Rueesch, S., Lemoine, M. & Richner, H. Ectoparasite reproductive performance when host condition varies. Parasitol Res 111, 1193–1203 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00436-012-2953-3

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