When a little transmission goes a long way: drivers of high parasite prevalence in sedentary monarchs

Monarch nectaring on tropical milkweed

A new paper led by Altizer lab alum Ania Majewska, and co-authored by Richard and former REU student Anna Schneider, was just published in Proceedings B. Ania uses a neat combination of field, lab and modeling approaches to show that the super high infection prevalence of the protozoan OE in monarchs can be explained by multiple transmission modes. You can read more about the study and its implications on this thread on Richard’s twitter feed.