Costs of Franklin’s ground squirrel ( Poliocitellus franklinii ) ectoparasitism reveal adaptive sex allocation

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Pero, Ellen M. Hare, James F.
Copyright Year	2018
Abstract	Parasite infestation may impose direct costs of blood, nutrient, and energy depletion, along with indirect costs of increased immune response upon hosts. We investigated how ectoparasitism influences body mass and reproduction in a free-living population of Franklin's ground squirrels ( Poliocitellus franklinii Sabine, 1822) located near Delta Marsh, Manitoba. We experimentally reduced ectoparasite burden by treating seven reproductive females with an insecticide following breeding, and contrasted body mass and reproductive performance of those individuals to seven sham treated control females. Insecticide treated dams did not differ from sham-treated dams in body mass, litter size, or juvenile mass, and thus, dam growth and reproduction were not compromised by ectoparasite defense at the infestation levels experienced in this study. Litter sex ratio differed significantly between insecticide-treated and control females, however, with a higher proportion of male offspring produced among females with.
Starting Page	585
Ending Page	591
Page Count	7
File Format	PDF HTM / HTML
DOI	10.1139/cjz-2017-0129
Volume Number	96
Alternate Webpage(s)	https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/88338/1/cjz-2017-0129.pdf
Alternate Webpage(s)	https://doi.org/10.1139/cjz-2017-0129
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article