Competition, virulence, host body mass and the diversification of macro-parasites

Author:

Rascalou Guilhem12,Gourbière Sébastien13

Affiliation:

1. Centre for the Study of Evolution, School of Life Sciences, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QG, UK

2. Maladies Infectieuses et Vecteurs: Ecologie, Génétique, Evolution et Contrôle (MIVEGEC), UMR Universités Montpellier 1 and 2, CNRS 5290, IRD 224, Montpellier, France

3. Université de Perpignan Via Domitia, EA 4218 Institut de Modélisation et d'Analyse en Géo-Environnements et Santé (IMAGES), Perpignan 66100, France

Abstract

Adaptive speciation has been much debated in recent years, with a strong emphasis on how competition can lead to the diversification of ecological and sexual traits. Surprisingly, little attention has been paid to this evolutionary process to explain intrahost diversification of parasites. We expanded the theory of competitive speciation to look at the effect of key features of the parasite lifestyle, namely fragmentation, aggregation and virulence, on the conditions and rate of sympatric speciation under the standard ‘pleiotropic scenario’. The conditions for competitive speciation were found similar to those for non-parasite species, but not the rate of diversification. Adaptive evolution proceeds faster in highly fragmented parasite populations and for weakly aggregated and virulent parasites. Combining these theoretical results with standard empirical allometric relationships, we showed that parasite diversification can be faster in host species of intermediate body mass. The increase in parasite load with body mass, indeed, fuels evolution by increasing mutants production, but because of the deleterious effect of virulence, it simultaneously weakens selection for resource specialization. Those two antagonistic effects lead to optimal parasite burden and host body mass for diversification. Data on the diversity of fishes' gills parasites were found consistent with the existence of such optimum.

Publisher

The Royal Society

Subject

Biomedical Engineering,Biochemistry,Biomaterials,Bioengineering,Biophysics,Biotechnology

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