Epidemiological, evolutionary, and coevolutionary implications of context-dependent parasitism.

ABSTRACT: Abstract Victims of infection are expected to suffer increasingly as parasite population growth increases. Yet, under some conditions, faster-growing parasites do not appear to cause more damage, and infections can be quite tolerable. We studied these conditions by assessing how the relationship between parasite population growth and host health is sensitive to environmental variation. In experimental infections of the crustacean Daphnia magna and its bacterial parasite Pasteuria ramosa, we show how easily an interaction can shift from a severe interaction, that is, when host fitness declines substantially with each unit of parasite growth, to a tolerable relationship by changing only simple environmental variables: temperature and food availability. We explored the evolutionary and epidem

SUBMITTER: Vale PF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3725425 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature