Temperature Drives Epidemics in a Zooplankton-Fungus Disease System: A Trait-Driven Approach Points to Transmission via Host Foraging.

Temperature Drives Epidemics in a Zooplankton-Fungus Disease System: A Trait-Driven Approach Points to Transmission via Host Foraging. Am Nat. 2018 Apr;191(4):435-451 Authors: Shocket MS, Strauss AT, Hite JL, Šljivar M, Civitello DJ, Duffy MA, Cáceres CE, Hall SR Abstract Climatic warming will likely have idiosyncratic impacts on infectious diseases, causing some to increase while others decrease or shift geographically. A mechanistic framework could better predict these different temperature-disease outcomes. However, such a framework remains challenging to develop, due to the nonlinear and (sometimes) opposing thermal responses of different host and parasite traits and due to the difficulty of validating model predictions with observations and experiments. We address these challenges in a zooplankton-fungus (Daphnia dentifera-Metschnikowia bicuspidata) system. We test the hypothesis that warmer temperatures promote disease spread and produce larger epidemics. In lakes, epidemics that start earlier and warmer in autumn grow much larger. In a mesocosm experiment, warmer temperatures produced larger epidemics. A mechanistic model parameterized with trait assays revealed that this pattern arose primarily from the temperature dependence of transmission rate (β), governed by the increasing foraging (and, hence, parasite exposure) rate of hosts (f). In the trait assays, parasite production seemed sufficiently responsive to shape epidem...
Source: The American Naturalist - Category: Biology Authors: Tags: Am Nat Source Type: research