Data on flea combing removals from black-tailed prairie dogs, Vermejo Park Ranch, New Mexico, 2011

We studied black-tailed prairie dogs and their fleas in the short-grass prairie of Vermejo Park Ranch, New Mexico, USA, June-August 2011. We live-trapped and sampled prairie dogs on 20 plots at 13 prairie dog colonies. Upon capture, we anesthetized each prairie dog (and its fleas) with isoflurane and combed the prairie dog as thoroughly as possible for ectoparasites (as described below). We marked each prairie dog's ears with tags for permanent identification and released it at the point of capture upon recovery from anesthesia. During each capture event (defined as a primary occasion), prairie dogs were anesthetized in an induction chamber, held vertically by the nape, and combed thoroughly, 3 consecutive times, 15 seconds each, over 3 separate water-lined tubs to remove and trap fleas. Individual prairie dogs were trapped 1 to 6 times over the course of the field season. In this dataset, each primary sampling occasion for an individual prairie dog (separated by 5 or more days) was considered independent of other occasions. The data set (Flea Combing Removal Data.xlsx) includes the following information for each primary sampling occasion: primary sampling occasion number (PrimaryOccasion); identification number of the unique, individual flea detected (Flea); an encounter history for each individual flea (EncounterHistory); and the Julian day of sampling in 2011 (JulianDay in the year 2011, where the first two digits are the last two digits of the year 2011 and the number after the dash is the Julian Day). Multiple individual fleas could be collected from the same prairie dog within a sampling occasion. Flea encounter histories were ‘100’ if the flea was combed into the 1st water-lined tub, ‘010’ if combed into the 2nd tub, and ‘001’ if combed into the 3rd tub.