Instruct: Identify the main and secondary category of Arxiv papers based on the titles and abstracts
Query: A reply to 'Ranging Behavior Drives Parasite Richness: A More
  Parsimonious Hypothesis'   This preprint has been reviewed and recommended by Peer Community In Ecology
(https://dx.doi.org/10.24072/pci.ecology.100001). In a recent article,
Bicca-Marques and Calegaro-Marques [2016] discussed the putative assumptions
related to an interpretation we provided regarding an observed positive
relationship between weekly averaged parasite richness of a group of mandrills
(Mandrillus sphinx) and their daily path lengths (DPL), published earlier in
the same journal (Brockmeyer et al., 2015). In our article, we proposed, inter
alia, that "the daily travels of mandrills could be seen as a way to escape
contaminated habitats on a local scale". In their article, Bicca-Marques and
Calegaro-Marques [2016] proposed an alternative mechanism that they considered
to be more parsimonious. In their view, increased DPL also increases exposure
to novel parasites from the environment. In other words, while we proposed that
elevated DPL may be a consequence of elevated parasite richness, they viewed it
as a cause. We are happy to see that our study attracted so much interest that
it evoked a public comment. We are also grateful to Bicca-Marques and
Calegaro-Marques [2016] for pointing out an obvious alternative scenario that
we failed to discuss and for laying out several key factors and assumptions
that should be addressed by future studies examining the links between parasite
risk and group ranging. We use this opportunity to advance this discourse by
responding to some of the criticisms raised in their discussion of our article.
In this reply, we briefly contextualize the main object of criticism. We then
discuss the putative parsimony of the two competing scenarios.

30
The categories of this paper are: q-alg
36
The categories of this paper are: cmp-lg
27
The categories of this paper are: comp-gas
23
The categories of this paper are: solv-int
3
The categories of this paper are: physics
19
The categories of this paper are: eess
26
The categories of this paper are: bayes-an
28
The categories of this paper are: alg-geom
14
The categories of this paper are: math-ph
32
The categories of this paper are: atom-ph
6
The categories of this paper are: astro-ph
25
The categories of this paper are: patt-sol
31
The categories of this paper are: ao-sci
20
The categories of this paper are: acc-phys
22
The categories of this paper are: chao-dyn
34
The categories of this paper are: chem-ph