Fig. 2

(Left) Probability of at least one zygote for varying gametocyte densities, a female sex ratio of 0.7, and 2 male gametes per gametocyte. Black is for Poisson gametocyte draws with male gametes exploring 1/10,000 of a blood meal, green is for Poisson gametocyte draws with male gametes exploring 1/1000 of a blood meal, and blue is for an negative binomial gametocyte draw with overdispersion k = 1 and male gametes exploring 1/10,000 of a blood meal. The red shaded bar is the Schneider et al. [10]. fit to data, and the pink shaded bar is an approximation to the Da et al. data. The inset shows the probability of at least one zygote zoomed in at low gametocyte densities. (Right) The distribution, mean and one standard deviation for the number of zygotes for each of the three scenarios simulated on the left. The pink shaded bar is for the Da et al. [11] data on oocysts. The histograms for female gametocytes, male gametocytes, and zygotes in a blood meal for each condition in this Figure can be found in Additional file 1: Figures S1–S3