ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2013
Host and parasite diversity jointly control disease risk in complex communities.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 60 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
60 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Are we overestimating risk of enteric pathogen spillover from wild birds to humans?Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2020Pooled it
- Who let the cats out? A global meta-analysis on risk of parasitic infection in indoor versus outdoor domestic cats ( Felis catus).Biology letters · 2019Pooled it
- Viral Infection Risk Driven by Ecological Trait Susceptibility to Habitat Heterogeneity.Molecular ecology · 2026Article
- Parasitiformes (ticks) and Acariformes (mites) vectors and their vertebrate host diversity: A global scoping review.One health (Amsterdam, Netherlands) · 2025Review
- Warming increases richness and shapes assemblages of eukaryotic parasitic plankton.Environmental microbiome · 2025Article
- Diversity-disease relationships in natural microscopic nematode communities.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Pathogens and planetary change.Nature reviews. Biodiversity · 2025Article
- Diverging effects of host density and richness across biological scales drive diversity-disease outcomes.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Inconsistent dilution: experimental but not field evidence for a dilution effect in Daphnia-bacteria interactions.Oecologia · 2024Article
- "Till death do us apart": The common destiny of brown hare and its parasite community.International journal for parasitology. Parasites and wildlife · 2023Article
- Habitat quality influences pollinator pathogen prevalence through both habitat-disease and biodiversity-disease pathways.Ecology · 2023Article
- Helminth biocoenosis ofInternational journal for parasitology. Parasites and wildlife · 2022Article
- Wildlife susceptibility to infectious diseases at global scales.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Honey Bee Habitat Sharing Enhances Gene Flow of the Parasite Nosema ceranae.Microbial ecology · 2022Article
- An eco-epidemiological modeling approach to investigate dilution effect in two different tick-borne pathosystems.Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America · 2022Article
- Metagenomics show high spatiotemporal virus diversity and ecological compartmentalisation: Virus infections of melon,Virus evolution · 2022Article
- Managing Wildlife Disease Under Climate Change.EcoHealth · 2021Article
- Dilution effects in disease ecology.Ecology letters · 2021Review
- The dilution effect limits plasmid horizontal transmission in multispecies bacterial communities.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2021Article
- Dinophyceae can use exudates as weapons against the parasite Amoebophrya sp. (Syndiniales).ISME communications · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Host-parasite interactions are embedded within complex communities composed of multiple host species and a cryptic assemblage of other parasites. To date, however, surprisingly few studies have explored the joint effects of host and parasite richness on disease risk, despite growing interest in the diversity-disease relationship. Here, we combined field surveys and mechanistic experiments to test how transmission of the virulent trematode Ribeiroia ondatrae was affected by the diversity of both amphibian hosts and coinfecting parasites. Within natural wetlands, host and parasite species richness correlated positively, consistent with theoretical predictions. Among sites that supported Ribeiroia, however, host and parasite richness interacted to negatively affect Ribeiroia transmission between its snail and amphibian hosts, particularly in species-poor assemblages. In laboratory and outdoor experiments designed to decouple the relative contributions of host and parasite diversity, increases in host richness decreased Ribeiroia infection by 11-65%. Host richness also tended to decrease total infections by other parasite species (four of six instances), such that more diverse host assemblages exhibited ∼40% fewer infections overall. Importantly, parasite richness further reduced both per capita and total Ribeiroia infection by 15-20%, possibly owing to intrahost competition among coinfecting species. These findings provide evidence that parasitic and free-living diversity jointly regulate disease risk, help to resolve apparent contradictions in the diversity-disease relationship, and emphasize the challenges of integrating research on coinfection and host heterogeneity to develop a community ecology-based approach to infectious diseases.
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