Demonstrating parasitic water mite-induced mortality in natural host populations

SUMMARYThe truncated negative binomial distribution is used to demonstrate water mite-induced mortality in a field population of the mosquito host Anopheles crucians. Consistent changes in the parameters of this distribution and in the number of hosts expected in higher mite load classes as truncation is applied to successively lower mite load classes suggest that many heavily parasitized individuals were missing from field samples. These changes are not observed in distributions derived from an association between parasitic larvae of another water mite, Hydrachna conjecta, and the insect Sigara ornata, which is apparently immune to this parasite. Although the method discloses parasite-induced mortality that is non-linearly related to parasite load, it fails to reveal linear parasite-induced mortality in a hypothetical example.