Data on the fleas of house mice and ship rats in the Orongorongo Valley, New Zealand

Data on autopsies and fleas of individual rats and mice snap-trapped in 80 quarterly 3-day trapping sessions over 1971-1991 in the Orongorongo Valley, Wellington, New Zealand. The fleas are preserved as slides in the Pilgrim Collection of Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand, Wellington. The data are analysed in a forthcoming paper by Fitzgerald, Efford and Karl.

'Autopsy data.csv' is the main spreadsheet.

'Data format.csv' defines columns and codes.

The autopsy data are a subset of those reported by Fitzgerald, Efford
and Karl (2004) and Efford, Fitzgerald, Karl and Berben (2006), both
with respect to the sampling period (trapping continued after May 1991,
but rats and mice were not searched for fleas) and data columns
(some reproductive fields have been omitted).

The autopsy data may be read from the csv file into R (R Core Team 2023)
with the statement:

autopsyF <- read.csv(file = 'Orongorongo fleas 1971-1991 Autopsy data.csv')

The resulting dataframe has 31 columns and 3006 rows:

names(autopsyF)
 [1] "Autopsy"       "Line"          "Date"          "Analysis.Year" "Session"      
 [6] "Day"           "Season"        "Trap"          "Traptype"      "Alive.dead"   
[11] "Species"       "Sex"           "Age"           "Weight"        "TotLth"       
[16] "TailLth"       "Fleas"         "LsegnisM"      "LsegnisF"      "LsegnisU"     
[21] "Lsegnis"       "NfascM"        "NfascF"        "NfascU"        "Nfasc"        
[26] "Vagina"        "Lact"          "Uterus"        "EmbryosT"      "ScarCond"     
[31] "Testes"   
      
nrow(autopsyF)
[1] 3006

For completeness, the autopsy data include 64 hosts from these trapping sessions that were
not searched for fleas (coded as Fleas = 2).

Quarterly indices of host density were tabulated by Fitzgerald et al. (2004; mice) and
Efford et al. (2006; rats).

References

Efford MG, Fitzgerald BM, Karl BJ, Berben PH. 2006. Population dynamics
  of the ship rat Rattus rattus L. in the Orongorongo Valley, New Zealand.
  New Zealand Journal of Zoology 33:273-297.

Fitzgerald BM, Efford MG, Karl BJ. 2004. Breeding of house mice and the
  mast seeding of southern beeches in the Orongorongo Valley, New Zealand.
  New Zealand Journal of Zoology 31:167-184.

Fitzgerald BM, Efford MG, Karl BJ. 2023. The fleas of house mice (Mus musculus)
  and ship rats (Rattus rattus) in forest of the Orongorongo Valley, New Zealand.
  For submission to New Zealand Journal of Zoology.

R Core Team 2023. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing.
  R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria.
  https://www.R-project.org/