Abstract
Evidence for parasite-induced host mortality from field data remains difficult to obtain. We have developed analytical models to investigate the effects of parasite-induced host mortality on the distribution of macroparasites among individual hosts as a function of host age. Under the assumptions of these models, it is shown that a decrease of the mean parasite load or of its dispersion implies that there is parasite-induced host mortality and that infection rate is variable for different hosts in the population. Observed patterns will depend on the nature of such variation and of the relation between parasite load and host mortality.