Willow warblers and blood parasitism

Jul 25, 2019

Marjorie Sorensen and her international team of collaborators have just published a paper in Ecology and Evolution asking whether longer bird migrations are associated with increased blood parasitism, by exposing birds to a greater variety of parasites. Marjorie and team used stable isotopes to estimate the migration distances of willow warblers wintering in Zambia, and found that this was unrelated to blood parasitism or other indices of health and condition, suggesting that other factors might be more important in determining individual susceptibility to disease in migratory birds.

News

Chima Nwaogu presents research lecture at Uppsala University, Sweden

Dr Chima Nwaogu visited the Animal Ecology Unit at the Evolutionsbiologisk centrum (EBC) at Uppsala University, Sweden, to present the 2025 Christer Hemborg lecture. He gave a research lecture on why Afrotropical birds breed when they do, based on analyses of breeding records derived from Major John Colebrook-Robjent’s egg collection currently held at the Livingstone Museum. He explored how the effects of pre-rain tree green-up and rainfall onset differentially drive invertebrate and grass seed abundance, influencing multiple seasonal bird breeding patterns throughout the year.

read more