ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
Host and parasite thermal ecology jointly determine the effect of climate warming on epidemic dynamics.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 72 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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Who cites it
72 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Warmer Is Deadlier: A Meta-Analysis Reveals Increasing Temperatures Accentuate Disease Effects on Fisheries Hosts.Ecology letters · 2025Pooled it
- Coinfections Dampen the Effects of Temperature on Host-Parasite Interactions.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Spatially explicit forecasts of tree insect and disease incidence across North American forests under future climate scenarios.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Virulent Parasites Emerge in Hosts With Rising Temperatures.Global change biology · 2026Article
- Ectoparasite prevalence in farmed seabass (Dicentrarchus labrax) from Damietta, Egypt: environmental correlations and histological consequences.Veterinary research communications · 2026Article
- Modeling Phenological and Physiological Responses to Climate Warming in a Hypothetical Migratory Songbird-Mosquito System.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Temperature and Resources Interact to Affect Transmission via Host Foraging Rate and Susceptibility.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- Two Hypotheses About Climate Change and Species Distributions.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- Fjord oceanographic dynamics provide refuge for critically endangeredProceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Future climate change and the distributional shift of the common vampire bat, Desmodus rotundus.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Systematic shifts in the variation among host individuals must be considered in climate-disease theory.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Host traits and temperature predict biogeographical variation in seagrass disease prevalence.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Impacts of Weather Anomalies and Climate on Plant Disease.Ecology letters · 2025Review
- Parasites of the hermit crab Pagurus hirsutiusculus; distribution, prevalence, and thermal ecology.PloS one · 2025Article
- Early warning signals do not predict a warming-induced experimental epidemic.PLOS global public health · 2025Article
- A Mosquito Parasite Is Locally Adapted to Its Host but Not Temperature.The American naturalist · 2024Article
- Abiotic and biotic factors jointly influence the contact and environmental transmission of a generalist pathogen.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- High parasite prevalence in an ecosystem engineer correlated with both local- and landscape-level factors.Oecologia · 2024Article
- Warming alters life-history traits and competition in a phage community.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2024Article
- Interconnecting global threats: climate change, biodiversity loss, and infectious diseases.The Lancet. Planetary health · 2024Review
12 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Host-parasite systems have intricately coupled life cycles, but each interactor can respond differently to changes in environmental variables like temperature. Although vital to predicting how parasitism will respond to climate change, thermal responses of both host and parasite in key traits affecting infection dynamics have rarely been quantified. Through temperature-controlled experiments on an ectothermic host-parasite system, we demonstrate an offset in the thermal optima for survival of infected and uninfected hosts and parasite production. We combine experimentally derived thermal performance curves with field data on seasonal host abundance and parasite prevalence to parameterize an epidemiological model and forecast the dynamical responses to plausible future climate-warming scenarios. In warming scenarios within the coastal southeastern United States, the model predicts sharp declines in parasite prevalence, with local parasite extinction occurring with as little as 2 °C warming. The northern portion of the parasite's current range could experience local increases in transmission, but assuming no thermal adaptation of the parasite, we find no evidence that the parasite will expand its range northward under warming. This work exemplifies that some host populations may experience reduced parasitism in a warming world and highlights the need to measure host and parasite thermal performance to predict infection responses to climate change.
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