Scale‐Dependent Effects of Host Patch Traits on Species Composition in a Stickleback Parasite Metacommunity

Bolnick, Daniel I.; Resetarits, Emlyn J.; Ballare, Kimberly M.; Stuart, Yoel E.; Stutz, William E.

doi:10.1002/bes2.1792

Cited by 8 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…Like most animals, threespine stickleback ( Gasterosteus aculeatus ) carry a rich community of macroparasites. The composition and diversity of this community varies substantially among habitats (e.g., estuary, stream, or lake), and among populations of a given habitat (MacColl 2009; Bolnick et al 2020). For example, the cestode Schistocephalus solidus predominantly infects lake populations of stickleback, but among lakes infection prevalence can range from 0% to over 75% (Fig.…”

Section: Main Textmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolution of a costly immunity to cestode parasites is a pyrrhic victory

Weber

Steinel

Peng

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Parasites impose fitness costs on their hosts. Biologists therefore tend to assume that natural selection favors infection-resistant hosts. Yet, when the immune response itself is costly, theory suggests selection may instead favor loss of resistance. Immune costs are rarely documented in nature, and there are few examples of adaptive loss of resistance. Here, we show that when marine threespine stickleback colonized freshwater lakes they gained resistance to the freshwater-associated tapeworm, Schistocephalus solidus. Extensive peritoneal fibrosis and inflammation contribute to suppression of cestode growth and viability, but also impose a substantial cost of reduced fecundity. Combining genetic mapping and population genomics, we find that the immune differences between tolerant and resistant populations arise from opposing selection in both populations acting, respectively, to reduce and increase resistance consistent with divergent optimization.One Sentence SummaryRecently-evolved freshwater populations of stickleback frequently evolve increased resistance to tapeworms, involving extensive fibrosis that suppresses parasite growth; because this fibrosis greatly reduces fish fecundity, in some freshwater populations selection has favored an infection-tolerant strategy with fibrosis suppression.

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Section: Main Textmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolution of a costly immunity to cestode parasites is a pyrrhic victory

Weber

Steinel

Peng

et al. 2021

Preprint

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“…The large geographic scope from which the fish were sampled allowed us to assess parasitic burden among host populations across a spectrum of ecosystem sizes, estimated in our modelling framework with the metric of island size (Bolnick et al, 2020). The random placement hypothesis states that larger ecosystems have higher numbers of individuals present based on increasing space availability (Connor & McCoy, 1979).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Life history mediates the association between parasite abundance and geographic features

Williams

Faiad

Claar

et al. 2022

Journal of Animal Ecology

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Although parasites are ubiquitous in marine ecosystems, predicting the abundance of parasites present within marine ecosystems has proven challenging due to the unknown effects of multiple interacting environmental gradients and stressors. Furthermore, parasites often are considered as a uniform group within ecosystems despite their significant diversity. We aim to determine the potential importance of multiple predictors of parasite abundance in coral reef ecosystems, including reef area, island area, human population density, chlorophyll‐a, host diversity, coral cover, host abundance and island isolation. Using a model selection approach within a database of more than 1,200 individual fish hosts and their parasites from 11 islands within the Pacific Line Islands archipelago, we reveal that geographic gradients, including island area and island isolation, emerged as the best predictors of parasite abundance. Life history moderated the relationship; parasites with complex life cycles increased in abundance with increasing island isolation, while parasites with direct life cycles decreased with increasing isolation. Direct life cycle parasites increased in abundance with increasing island area, although complex life cycle parasite abundance was not associated with island area. This novel analysis of a unique dataset indicates that parasite abundance in marine systems cannot be predicted precisely without accounting for the independent and interactive effects of each parasite's life history and environmental conditions.

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“…Multiple host species often experience similar parasite pressures (Lafferty et al, 2006; Ostfeld et al, 2018). Yet, despite being attacked by shared parasites, the prevalence (proportion of the host population parasitised) and intensity (number of parasites per infected host) of parasitism often vary considerably, both among closely related host species within the same community (Gobbin et al, 2020; Mlynarek et al, 2015; Worthen & Turner, 2015) and among populations of the same host (Bolnick et al, 2020; Penczykowski et al, 2014; Preisser, 2019). Why do closely related host species that share similar defensive strategies and co‐occur in local communities often exhibit such striking variation in the outcomes of their interactions with parasites?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A role for the local environment in driving species‐specific parasitism in a multi‐host parasite system

Hasik

Siepielski

2022

Freshwater Biology

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The extent and magnitude of parasitism often vary among closely related host species and across populations within species. Determining the ecological basis for this species and population‐level variation in parasitism is critical for understanding infection dynamics in multi‐host–parasite systems. To investigate such ecological underpinnings of variation in parasitism, we studied Enallagma damselfly host species and their water mite (Arrenurus spp.) ectoparasites in lakes. We first evaluated how host identity and density could shape parasitism. To test the effects of con‐ and heterospecific host density on parasitism, we used a field experiment with Enallagma basidens and E. signatum. We found that parasitism did not vary with con‐ or heterospecific density and was determined by host identity alone, with no spillover effects. We also evaluated the potential role of local adaptation and resource availability in shaping parasitism. To do so, we used E. signatum in a reciprocal transplant experiment crossed with a prey resource‐level manipulation. This experiment revealed that parasitism declined sharply for one host population in its non‐local lake, but not the other source population, with no effects of prey levels. This asymmetry implies that damselflies express enhanced defences against parasitism that are neither population‐specific nor dependent on resource abundance, or that mites developed heightened local host specificity. The results of multivariate modeling from an observational study generally supported these experimental findings: neither host density nor resource abundance strongly explained among‐population variation in parasitism. Instead, local abiotic conditions (pH) had the strongest relationship with parasitism, with minimal associations with predator density, temperature and a measure of immune function. Collectively, our findings suggest a crucial role for the local environment in shaping host–parasite interactions within multi‐host–parasite systems. More generally, these results show that research at the intersection of community ecology and disease ecology is critical for understanding host–parasite dynamics within natural communities.

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Scale‐Dependent Effects of Host Patch Traits on Species Composition in a Stickleback Parasite Metacommunity

Cited by 8 publications

References 0 publications

Evolution of a costly immunity to cestode parasites is a pyrrhic victory

Evolution of a costly immunity to cestode parasites is a pyrrhic victory

Life history mediates the association between parasite abundance and geographic features

A role for the local environment in driving species‐specific parasitism in a multi‐host parasite system

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