Mairenn Attwood’s paper ‘How do parasites and predators choose their victim? A trade-off between quality and vulnerability across antagonistic interactions’ is out now in the journal Biological Reviews. This paper brings together literature from across different types of parasitism, inspired by the brood parasites and hosts we study in Choma. It presents a new conceptual insight: that there is a general trade-off characterising host choice by parasites. This applies to brood parasites, but also to pathogens, kleptoparasites (which steal food), trophic parasites (which eat the host), selfish genetic elements, and predators. The trade-off is between host quality (how valuable its resources are to a parasite) and host vulnerability (how easy it is for a parasite to get those resources). The paper suggests situations when this trade-off arises and how we can predict whether host quality or vulnerability will be the most important to a parasite. It also looks at honest and deceptive signals that hosts and prey can give to change parasites’ and predators’ choices.
You can read the full paper here: https://doi.org/10.1111/brv.70037
