3.5.4 Flea biased parasitism on rodent’s sex and weight
We observed that sex biased fleas infestation was frequently recorded on male rodents than females; male rodents were significantly increasing flea infestation load. A study conducted by Moore and Wilson (2002) has shown that arthropods (especially sticking ectoparasites) obviously exhibit male-biased parasitism because most of them wait for the host to visit their area rather than them searching for the host. An animal that explore many habitats and visit many ecological niches has high probability to encounter many parasites frequently compared to less explorative animal with small movements within its ecological niche. Our result is arguably with different studies (Gaines and McClenaghan, 1980; Bitam et al ., 2010 and Buchholz and Dick, 2017) which also observed a similar relationship with males having high flea infestation than female because of their large home range and wide dispersal area as compared to female rodents. The little difference in weight between male and female rodents obtained in this study could or could not influence flea sex biased parasitism on rodents. Sex biased parasitism should not be taken as a general rule since in other study elsewhere it was found that in some host-parasite relationship both male and female rodent hosts were found equally infested with fleas (Wirsing et al ., 2007; Kiffner et al ., 2011)
Similarly, weight of rodents in the general community was significantly influencing the increase in abundance of fleas. Under natural phenomenon weight of rodents is equivalent to the size and age of respective rodent specie. The change of these parameters affects the physiological and behavioral status of the individual rodent in particular ecological habitat whereby the increase of these parameters could facilitate rodents to become more explorative with large home range and dispersion in searching for food, mates or better shelter and in the meanwhile they keep increasing the frequency of encountering many fleas. Correspondingly, large rodents are easy target for ectoparasites compared to small one, they can also tolerate many fleas, while the youngest one would perform anti-parasitic grooming frequently (Wilsonet al , 2002; Hawlena et al ., 2008).