TY - JOUR T1 - Intensity of infection with intracellular <em>Eimeria</em> spp. and pinworms is reduced in hybrid mice compared to parental subspecies JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/683698 SP - 683698 AU - Alice Balard AU - Víctor Hugo Jarquín-Díaz AU - Jenny Jost AU - Iva Martincová AU - Ľudovít Ďureje AU - Jaroslav Piálek AU - Miloš Macholán AU - Joëlle Goüy de Bellocq AU - Stuart J. E. Baird AU - Emanuel Heitlinger Y1 - 2019/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/07/01/683698.abstract N2 - The longstanding impression that hybrid mice are more highly parasitized and therefore less fit than parentals persists despite the findings of recent studies. Working across a novel transect of the European House Mouse hybrid zone we assessed intracellular infections by Eimeria, a parasite of high pathogenicity, and infections by pinworms, assumed to be less pathogenic. For Eimeria we found lower intensities in hybrid hosts than in parental mice but no evidence of lowered probability of infection in the centre of the hybrid zone. This means ecological and epidemiological factors are very unlikely to be responsible for the reduced load of infected hybrids. Focussing on parasite intensity (load in infected hosts) we also corroborated reduced pinworm loads reported for hybrid mice in previous studies. In addition we questioned whether differences in body condition during infection would indicate different impacts on hybrid vs. parental hosts’ health. We couldn’t show such an effect. We conclude that intensity of diverse parasites, including the previously unstudied Eimeria, is reduced in hybrid mice compared to parental subspecies. We suggest caution in extrapolating this to differences in hybrid host fitness in the absence of, for example, evidence for a link between parasitemia and health. ER -