How intraguild predation affects the host diversity-disease relationship in a multihost community

Abstract

Broad evidence has shown that host diversity can impede disease invasion and reduce the eventual prevalence, but little is known on how species interactions play in shaping this host diversity-disease relationship. Previous work has illustrated that intraguild predation (IGP), combined with parasite-mediated indirect effects, can have strong influences on parasitic infection. Following this line of thinking, we here examine the role of predatory interactions in the disease transmission within a multihost community. Through varying fractions of IGP in a competitive community, we show that, dependent on the fraction of predatory interactions, species richness can switch from enhancing to inhibiting disease establishment/prevalence. Without IGP interactions, high host species richness can likely weaken the ‘dilution effect’ and in some cases even enhance the disease establishment (and/or prevalence) due to the existence of alternative sources for infection, whereas IGP can generally heighten the negative diversity-disease relationship due to the reduction of encounter rate between prospective hosts and parasites. Although trait-mediated interactions (captured as the infection-induced changes in predation rate) only weakly affect disease prevalence, density-mediated interactions (captured as the additional infection-induced mortality) can pose a relatively strong influence on disease transmission. Our results thus underline the importance of considering species interactions when investigating the host diversity-disease relationship.