Abstract
Parasite Evolution and Life History Theory
Highlights
It is widely appreciated that parasites are prone to rapid evolution, and because of their often short generation times and large population sizes, parasites may evolve far more rapidly than their hosts
Babayan et al propose that the life history of parasitic microfilarial worms shows evidence of adaptive ‘‘plasticity.’’ they propose that worm development inside a mammalian host changes in response to the host’s immunity, and that the parasite’s response matches predictions from life history theory
Life history theory addresses the birth and death schedule of an organism in the context of its environment: how is natural selection expected to shape an organism’s age of first reproduction, its fecundity, and survival? (See [6,7,8,9] for reviews.) Body size and other phenotypic traits are often considered in the theory
Summary
Parasites are extraordinarily diverse. Even closely related parasites may behave very differently, infecting different host species, causing different pathologies, or infecting different tissues. A population that loses half its individuals each year to predation is expected to evolve to begin reproducing at a younger age than a population losing only 10% of its individuals to predation annually This occurs even though early reproduction has costs that would reduce lifetime fecundity if predation is low. The difficulty is that we do not know what life history options are available to the organism, and unless those options are known, prediction is hard To escape this dilemma, life history theory applications have developed almost completely in a comparative context, predicting how birth and death schedules should vary across populations of the same species in different environments. An approach taken to determine if an organism displays adaptive phenotypic plasticity is to compare the responses in the two environments and see if the differences observed are consistent with what might be expected if the organism had optimized to the two environments
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