Few studies of wild animal performance account for parasite infections: A systematic review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Wild animals have parasites. This inconvenient truth has far-reaching implications for biologists measuring animal performance traits: infection with parasites can alter host behaviour and physiology in profound and sometimes counterintuitive ways. Yet, to what extent do studies on wild animals take individual infection status into account? We performed a systematic review across eight scientific journals primarily publishing studies in animal behaviour and physiology over a 5-year period to assess the proportion of studies which acknowledge, treat or control for parasite infection in their study design and/or analyses. We explored whether parasite inclusion differed between studies that are experimental versus observational, conducted in the field vs the laboratory and measured behavioural vs physiological traits. We also investigated the importance of other factors such as the journal, the trait category (e.g. locomotion, reproduction) measured, the vertebrate taxonomic group investigated and the host climatic zone of origin. Our results show that parasite inclusion was generally lacking across recent studies on wild vertebrates. In over 680 filtered papers, we found that only 21.9% acknowledged the potential effects of infections on animal performance in the text, and only 5.1% of studies treated animals for infection (i.e. parasite control) or considered infection status in the statistical analyses (i.e. parasite analysis). Parasite inclusion, control and analysis were higher in laboratory compared to field studies and higher for physiological studies compared to behavioural studies but did not differ among journals, performance trait categories and taxonomic groups. Among climatic zones, parasite inclusion, control and analysis were higher in tropical, subtropical and temperate zones than in boreal and polar zones. Overall, our literature review suggests that parasites are sorely under-acknowledged by researchers in recent years despite growing evidence that infections can modify animal performance. Given the ubiquity of parasites in the environment, we encourage scientists to consider individual infection status when assessing performance of wild animals. We also suggest ways for researchers to implement such practices in both experimental and observational studies.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".