Local adaptation drives thermal tolerance among parasite populations: a common garden experiment.

ABSTRACT: Understanding the evolutionary responses of organisms to thermal regimes is of prime importance to better predict their ability to cope with ongoing climate change. Although this question has attracted interest in free-living organisms, whether or not infectious diseases have evolved heterogeneous responses to climate is still an open question. Here, we ran a common garden experiment using the fish ectoparasite Tracheliastes polycolpus, (i) to test whether parasites living in thermally heterogeneous rivers respond differently to an experimental thermal gradient and (ii) to determine the evolutionary processes (natural selection or genetic drift) underlying these responses. We demonstrated that the reaction norms involving the survival rate of the parasite larvae (i.e. the infective stage)

SUBMITTER: Maze-Guilmo E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4874721 | biostudies-literature | 2016 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature