ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2013
Experimental elimination of parasites in nature leads to the evolution of increased resistance in hosts.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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22 citing papers in PubMed.
- Pace of life predicts parasite resistance and fecundity tolerance, but not mortality tolerance, among Trinidadian guppies,Evolution letters · 2026Article
- Long-term effects of widespread pharmaceutical pollution on trade-offs between behavioural, life-history and reproductive traits in fish.The Journal of animal ecology · 2025Article
- Host defense alteration in Caenorhabditis elegans after evolution under ionizing radiation.BMC ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Associating with kin selects for disease resistance and against tolerance.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Size-selective harvesting affects the immunocompetence of guppies exposed to the parasiteProceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Functional immunogenetic variation, rather than local adaptation, predicts ectoparasite infection intensity in a model fish species.Molecular ecology · 2021Article
- Parasite diversity and ecology in a model species, the guppy (Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- The right response at the right time: Exploring helminth immune modulation in sticklebacks by experimental coinfection.Molecular ecology · 2019Article
- Do replicates of independent guppy lineages evolve similarly in a predator-free laboratory environment?Ecology and evolution · 2019Article
- Microparasite dispersal in metapopulations: a boon or bane to the host population?Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Article
- Rapid evolution rescues hosts from competition and disease but-despite a dilution effect-increases the density of infected hosts.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2017Article
- Experimental evidence that parasites drive eco-evolutionary feedbacks.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Bringing Back a Healthy Buzz? Invertebrate Parasites and Reintroductions: A Case Study in Bumblebees.EcoHealth · 2017Article
- Human drivers of ecological and evolutionary dynamics in emerging and disappearing infectious disease systems.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Review
- Does moving up a food chain increase aggregation in parasites?Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2016Article
- Increased susceptibility to fungal disease accompanies adaptation to drought in Brassica rapa.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2016Article
- A phylogeny of Cichlidogyrus spp. (Monogenea, Dactylogyridea) clarifies a host-switch between fish families and reveals an adaptive component to attachment organ morphology of this parasite genus.Parasites & vectors · 2015Article
- Pace of life, predators and parasites: predator-induced life-history evolution in Trinidadian guppies predicts decrease in parasite tolerance.Biology letters · 2015Article
- Below-ground abiotic and biotic heterogeneity shapes above-ground infection outcomes and spatial divergence in a host-parasite interaction.The New phytologist · 2015Article
- Rapid evolution of parasite resistance in a warmer environment: insights from a large scale field experiment.PloS one · 2015Article
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Abstract
A reduction in the strength of selection is expected to cause the evolution of reduced trait expression. Elimination of a parasite should thus cause the evolution of reduced resistance to that parasite. To test this prediction in nature, we studied the fourth- and eighth-generation descendants of guppies (Poecilia reticulata) introduced into four natural streams following experimental elimination of a common and deleterious parasite (Gyrodactylus spp.). After two generations of laboratory rearing to control for plasticity and maternal effects, we infected individual fish to assess their resistance to the parasite. Contrary to theoretical expectations, the introduced guppy populations had rapidly and repeatably evolved increased resistance to the now-absent parasite. This evolution was not owing to a resistance-tolerance trade-off, nor to differences in productivity among the sites. Instead, a leading candidate hypothesis is that the rapid life-history evolution typical in such introductions pleiotropically increases parasite resistance. Our study adds a new dimension to the growing evidence for contemporary evolution in the wild, and also points to the need for a re-consideration of simple expectations from host-parasite theory. In particular, our results highlight the need for increased consideration of multiple sources of selection and pleiotropy when studying evolution in natural contexts.
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