Table 1.
Prevalence and mean intensity of Hepatozoon and Eimeriorina parasites for the two lizard species analysed in this study, estimated using three different methods.
Figure 1.
Parasites found in common wall lizards analysed from Gerês, Portugal.
Hepatozoon sp. infecting erythrocytes from P. bocagei (A), and P. hispanica (B). Schellackia sp. infecting an erythrocyte from P. bocagei (C), and a leukocyte from P. hispanica (D). Scale bar = 5 µm.
Figure 2.
Phylogenetic relationships for the 18 S rRNA gene of the hemoparasites analyzed in this study.
Haplotypes retrieved from this study are in bold. Letters refer to lineages found previously in North African lizards [122].
Table 2.
False negatives for each of the three detection methods compared in this study.
Figure 3.
Comparison of the performance of various methods in estimating Hemogregarine infection intensity.
The two biological sources: blood (A) and tissue (B), and DNA extraction protocols: kit (C) and saline (D). Each line represents the logged Hepatozoon intensity measurement from qPCR for an individual extraction (n = 41, out of the subset of 47 samples after excluding 6 mixed infections).
Table 3.
Prevalence and mean intensity levels of Hepatozoon and prevalence of Eimeriorina parasites using different biological sources (blood and tissue) and extraction protocols (kit and saline) on a subset of samples tested with qPCR.
Figure 4.
Relationship between Hepatozoon intensity and host body size (SVL).
Different host species are represented by colours and sexes by shapes. Fit lines were calculated from the parameter estimates of a regression model only considering the significant factors (intensity∼body size+host species+sex+host species*body size).