General model of sex distribution, mating probability and egg production for macroparasites with polygamous mating system

Abstract

The reproductive habits of helminths are important for the study of the dynamics of their transmission. For populations of parasites distributed by Poisson or negative binomial models, these habits have already been studied. However, there are other statistical models that describe these populations, such as zero-inflated models, but where reproductive characteristics were not analyzed. Using an arbitrary model for the parasite population, we model the distribution of females and males per host, and from these we model the different reproductive variables such as the mean number of fertile females, the mean egg production, the mating probability, the mean fertilized egg production. We show that these variables change due to the effects of a negative density-dependence fecundity, a characteristic of helminth parasites. We present the results obtained for some particular models.