White-footed Mice Allogrooming Behavior in Response to Tick Infestation

Laboratory-reared sibling pairs of white-footed mice exhibited significantly higher allogrooming frequencies and durations when infested with blacklegged ticks. Jessica Brown authored this dataset, which supports findings submitted to Journal of Zoology. The dataset includes grooming bout counts and durations recorded using EthoVision® XT software.

Use Cases

• Analyze the relationship between tick infestation status and grooming behavior based on the 'Treatment' variable.
• Compare allogrooming frequency and duration between sexes based on the 'Sex' and 'Cogroom freq/duration' variables.
• Investigate the effect of tick load on grooming response based on the description noting tick load did not significantly predict allogrooming.
• Study the efficiency of grooming for tick removal based on the observed low tick attachment rates (mean approx. 8%).

Strengths

• Behavioral data was manually scored using specialized EthoVision® XT software.
• The study design includes controlled comparisons between tick-infested and non-infested sibling pairs.
• Results include a specific metric for tick attachment rates (mean approx. 8%).

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• The author notes future work with larger sample sizes is needed to clarify sex-based differences.

Provenance

Source

Harvard Dataverse

Collection Method

Laboratory experiment using Phenotyper Cages and EthoVision® XT software for recording and scoring.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-26 19:46:13; freshness should be verified.