Personality, space use, network, and tick infestation data from a field study of sleepy lizards, 2010 and 2014 - 2017

Host personality can markedly affect parasite transmission. Especially for
parasites with indirect transmission through the environment, the effects
of consistent among-individual differences in behavior may have both
direct and indirect components. For example, personality may mediate both
how hosts respond to infected individuals and the likelihood that hosts
indirectly interact with infected conspecifics (e.g., by visiting patches
infected hosts have previously contaminated). Integrating parasites,
personality, and these different kinds of interaction networks constitutes
a key step towards understanding transmission in natural systems. In the
original manuscript for this dataset (Payne et al. Ecological Monographs
2024), we evaluated these elements using a five-year field study of a wild
population of sleepy lizards, Tiliqua rugosa, and their tick parasites,
which transmit among lizards through lizards’ shared use of refuges. Using
Bayesian models, we evaluated (1) predictors of lizard infestation
probability and intensity (i.e., average tick count when infested) and (2)
relationships among the predictors. We used the latter set of models to
assess indirect relationships between the predictors and the infestation
metrics. As predictors, we used lizards’ infestation ‘risk’ (derived from
a time-lagged refuge-sharing transmission network), traits (sex, mass, and
the personality axes aggression and boldness), space use (number of unique
refuges used and home range overlap with other lizards), and measures of
synchronous social interactions (i.e., edge weight and degree). We found
both indirect and direct connections between our predictors and tick
infestation. For example, boldness was positively directly associated with
infection intensity and indirectly positively associated with both
infestation probability and intensity via intermediary connections with
social network interaction and risk. Using more unique refuges, on the
other hand, was indirectly negatively associated with infestation
probability (via reduced risk), but directly positively associated with
infestation probability, indicating a potential trade-off in the
anti-parasite benefits of using more refuges. Our results emphasize that
(1) multiple aspects of host behavior may be associated with parasite
infection, (2) these components may proceed through both direct and
indirect pathways, and (3) multiple pathways should be considered together
because the pathways may have compounding or counteracting effects.