ArticleBiology letters2022
Parasite-associated mortality in birds: the roles of specialist parasites and host evolutionary distance.
Article in Biology letters, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 25 citations in OpenAlex.
- Evolutionary drivers of sex-specific parasite prevalence in wild birds.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Pooled it
- Avian malaria and invasion success: Contrasting infection patterns in two introduced Eurasian sparrows in North America (International journal for parasitology. Parasites and wildlife · 2026Article
- Article
- Bird Community Composition, Migration, and Environmental Factors Jointly Influence the Global Distribution of Avian Haemosporidian Lineages.Integrative zoology · 2026Article
- Do specialist haemoparasites induce tolerance in their hosts?Parasitology · 2025Article
- Diversity and Host Specificity of Avian Haemosporidians in an Afrotropical Conservation Region.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Migratory birds have a distinct haemosporidian community and are temporally decoupled from vector abundance at a stopover site.Parasitology · 2024Article
- Genomic variation in Plasmodium relictum (lineage SGS1) and its implications for avian malaria infection outcomes: insights from experimental infections and genome-wide analysis.Malaria journal · 2024Article
- Parasite-associated mortality in birds: the roles of specialist parasites and host evolutionary distance.Biology letters · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The factors that influence whether a parasite is likely to cause death in a given host species are not well known. Generalist parasites with high local abundances, broad distributions and the ability to infect a wide phylogenetic diversity of hosts are often considered especially dangerous for host populations, though comparatively little research has been done on the potential for specialist parasites to cause host mortality. Here, using a novel database of avian mortality records, we tested whether phylogenetic host specialist or host generalist haemosporidian blood parasites were associated with avian host deaths based on infection records from over 81 000 examined hosts. In support of the hypothesis that host specialist parasites can be highly virulent in novel hosts, we found that the parasites that were associated with avian host mortality predominantly infected more closely related host species than expected under a null model. Hosts that died tended to be distantly related to the host species that a parasite lineage typically infects, illustrating that specialist parasites can cause death outside of their limited host range. Overall, this study highlights the overlooked potential for host specialist parasites to cause host mortality despite their constrained ecological niches.
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Registered trials
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