2021-2022 NAWA PPN/IWA/2019/1/00093, Iwanowska Scholarship

Scholarship holder

Joanna T. Białas

The goal of this project is to identify the ecological and environmental factors involved in tick-host interactions. We will study how ecological factors regulating host population numbers and habitat choice affect the population sizes of questing ticks. We will focus on the tick Ixodes ricinus and its bird host great tit Parus major. First, we will quantify variation in ecology, host tick numbers to reveal the spatiotemporal distribution of questing ticks, and ticks on great tits, as well as the spatiotemporal distribution of ecological factors hypothesized to drive variation in host and tick population sizes. Second, we will study the ecological factors impacting questing tick numbers and the ecological sources of variation in population numbers of hosts (great tits), ticks (questing ticks, and ticks carried by hosts), and their interactions. Finally, we will reveal whether ecological factors influencing host habitat selection also affect tick burden in hosts, and in turn numbers of questing ticks, and how host phenotypic traits (e.g. behaviour) influences this relation.