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.

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