Effect of haemosporidian infections on host survival and recapture rate in the blue tit

Abstract

Parasites are ubiquitous in the wild and by imposing fitness costs on their hosts they constitute an important selection factor. One of the most common parasites of wild birds are Plasmodium and Haemoproteus, protozoans inhabiting the blood, which cause avian malaria and malaria‐like disease, respectively. Although they are expected to cause negative effects in infected individuals, in many cases studies in natural populations failed to detect such effect.Using data from seven breeding seasons (2008–2014), we applied a multistate capture–mark–recapture approach to study the effect of infection with malaria and malaria‐like parasites, individual age and sex on the probability of survival and recapture rate in a small passerine, the blue tit Cyanistes caeruleus, inhabiting the island of Gotland, Sweden. We found no effect of infection on survival prospects. However, the recapture rate of infected individuals was higher than that of uninfected ones. Thus, while our data do not support the presence of infection costs in terms of host survival, it suggests that parasites from the genera Plasmodium and Haemoproteus may affect some aspects of host behaviour, which translates into biased estimation of infection frequency at the population level.