Eco-evolutionary dynamics of parasitism mediated through variance in host fitness

几乎所有的动物和植物都被寄生虫感染，这会降低健康和性能。除了这些总体影响外，预计寄生虫还会增加个体宿主在健康和性能方面的差异。因此，预计寄生虫会塑造宿主物种的生态和进化。这些预测适用于任何植物或动物宿主-寄生虫相互作用，但测试它们需要一个物种，其中（1）寄生虫可以被操纵，（2）健康和性能可以在整个生命周期中测量数千个个体。该项目使用一种定制的药物递送方法，从由数千只蜥蜴宿主组成的野生种群中清除几种不同种类的寄生虫。这些宿主寿命短，发生在小岛屿上，每年可以准确地对整个人口进行多次普查。最近开发的遗传方法每年将父母与后代相匹配，因此可以测量数千个个体的终身生存和繁殖，无论是驱虫还是未经治疗。该项目将测试寄生虫是否以及如何影响宿主健康和表现的变化。研究结果将增加对传染病的生态学和进化的理解，同时也验证了基本的进化理论。该项目将通过暑期讲习班支持科学教师的专业发展，从而对科学教育产生影响。讲习班的重点是建立数据收集，分析和绘图技能，并将这些技能传授给K-12学生。博士后，研究生和本科生的研究人员将在这个项目的指导下，重点是在路易斯斯托克斯少数民族参与联盟的本科生。虽然众所周知，寄生虫降低其主机的平均适应度，很少有研究测试是否寄生虫影响主机适应度的方差或探索由此产生的主机种群的进化动力学。在考虑总的生命适应度时尤其如此，这在大多数野生种群中是出了名的难以测量。该项目将联合收割机结合生态分子遗传学（GT-seq）中的新的高通量技术和定量遗传学（动物模型）中的既定方法，以提供一个详细的，多代的总寿命健身和其定量遗传结构在一个野生种群的寄生虫负担的实验和自然变化。该数据集的性质也将允许总寿命健身被分解成其组成部分（少年生存，成年人生存，交配成功，繁殖成功），并为疾病和寄生的进化动力学被认为是分别为女性和男性，从而提供额外的洞察关键进化假说的性别差异的选择和寄生虫的抗性和耐受性。暑期教师研讨会将与教育技术制造商合作，使用真实的统计数据，结合以策划的真实的数据集为特色的“即教”模块，向初中和高中学生教授数据技能。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

Nearly all animals and plants are infected by parasites that can reduce health and performance. In addition to these overall effects, parasites are predicted to increase variation among individual hosts in health and performance. Parasites are therefore predicted to shape the ecology and evolution of the host species. These predictions apply to any plant or animal host-parasite interaction but testing them requires a species in which (1) parasites can be manipulated and (2) health and performance can be measured across the entire lifetime for thousands of individuals. This project uses a custom drug delivery method to remove several different species of parasitic worm from a wild population comprised of thousands of individual lizard hosts. These hosts are short-lived and occur on small islands where the entire population can be accurately censused several times per year. Genetic methods have recently been developed to match parents to offspring each year, so lifetime survival and reproduction can be measured for thousands of individuals, in both de-wormed and untreated treatments. The project will test whether and how parasites influence variation in host health and performance. The results will increase understanding of the ecology and evolution of infectious disease while also testing fundamental evolution theory. The project will impact science education by supporting the professional development of science teachers through summer workshops. The workshops focus on building skills in data collection, analysis, and graphing, and in transmitting those skills to K-12 students. Postdoctoral, graduate, and undergraduate researchers will be mentored in this project, with a focus on undergraduates in the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation.Although it is well known that parasites reduce the mean fitness of their hosts, few studies have tested whether parasites influence variance in host fitness or explored the resulting evolutionary dynamics for host populations. This is particularly true when considering total lifetime fitness, which is notoriously difficult to measure in most wild populations. This project will combine new high-throughput techniques in ecological molecular genetics (GT-seq) with established approaches in quantitative genetics (animal models) to provide a detailed, multi-generational characterization of total lifetime fitness and its quantitative genetic architecture in a wild population with both experimental and natural variation in parasite burdens. The nature of the dataset will also allow total lifetime fitness to be decomposed into its components (juvenile survival, adult survival, mating success, reproductive success), and for evolutionary dynamics of disease and parasitism to be considered separately for females and males, thus providing additional insight into key evolutionary hypotheses about sex differences in selection and in parasite resistance and tolerance. The Summer Teacher Workshop will be done in collaboration with makers of educational technology that teaches data skills to middle- and high-school students using authentic statistics combined with “ready- to-teach” modules featuring curated real datasets.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.