An assessment of rodent‐flea diversity and association in a semi‐arid tropical ecosystem of south‐western Zimbabwe

In praise of commensalism

“…Herrán et al, 2022;Mikula et al, 2018Mikula et al, , 2020Warren et al, 2010). The same search (performed on 9th February 2023) on the term 'commensalism' in the database of articles published by the African Journal of Ecology (AJE) throughout its history, returned just 29 articles, some of them recently published (Banda et al, 2021;Gula & Barlow, 2023;Sebele et al, 2023;van Vuuren et al, 2022). However, of these 29 articles, only three (10.3%) really focused on the ecology of commensalism (Grandcolas, 1997;Plantan et al, 2013;Ruggiero & Eves, 1998), if we exclude a recent article showing the co-occurrence of pangolins and bats in the same burrows in Gabon (Lehmann et al, 2020).…”