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- Title
Coevolution of parasite virulence and host life history.
- Authors
Koella, Jacob C.; Restif, Olivier
- Abstract
Most models about the evolutionary interactions between a parasite’s virulence and its host’s life history neglect two potentially important aspects: epidemiological and coevolutionary feedback. We emphasize their importance by presenting models that describe the coevolution of a semelparous host’s age at reproduction and a parasite’s virulence in different environmental conditions. In particular, we first show that an epidemiological feedback will lead to a nonmonotonic response of the host’s age at reproduction as virulence increases. We then show that the coevolutionary pressure on virulence can lead to complex associations between the host’s life history and the parasite’s virulence, which would not be expected with more traditional models of host or parasite evolution. Thus, for example, a high mortality rate of the host favours avirulent parasites and late reproduction of the host when the environmental conditions allow the host to grow rapidly, but early reproduction and high virulence when growth is slow.
- Subjects
MICROBIAL virulence; COEVOLUTION; HOST-parasite relationships; LIFE cycles (Biology)
- Publication
Ecology Letters, 2001, Vol 4, Issue 3, p207
- ISSN
1461-023X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1046/j.1461-0248.2001.00213.x