A simple trapping method to estimate abundances of blood-sucking flying insects in avian nests

摘要

Parasitism is one of the major selective forces affecting avian life histories (Loye & Zuk 1991; Clayton & Moore 1997). Most studies on bird host-parasite interactions have investigated one or a few parasite species (see e.g. Martin et al. 2001), though it is a general assumption that a given host is the substrate of a very large and diverse parasite community (e.g. Marshall 1981; Loye & Zuk 1991; Loye & Carroll 1995). The result is that the global patterns of host-parasite interactions and our knowledge of the selection pressures that different parasites exert on avian life histories are far from complete (e.g. Loye & Carroll 1995; Martin et al. 2001).