ArticleEvolution letters2019
The evolution of stage-specific virulence: Differential selection of parasites in juveniles.
Article in Evolution letters, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed, 18 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pathogens pull hardest in the coevolutionary arms-race to determine age-specific transmission biases.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Coevolution of Age-Structured Tolerance and Virulence.Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2024Article
- Mosquito ageing modulates the development, virulence and transmission potential of pathogens.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- The evolution of age-specific resistance to infectious disease.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- The early life of a leaf-cutter ant colony constrains symbiont vertical transmission and favors horizontal transmission.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The impact of infectious disease is often very different in juveniles and adults, but theory has focused on the drivers of stage-dependent defense in hosts rather than the potential for stage-dependent virulence evolution in parasites. Stage structure has the potential to be important to the evolution of pathogens because it exposes parasites to heterogeneous environments in terms of both host characteristics and transmission pathways. We develop a stage-structured (juvenile-adult) epidemiological model and examine the evolutionary outcomes of stage-specific virulence under the classic assumption of a transmission-virulence trade-off. We show that selection on virulence against adults remains consistent with the classic theory. However, the evolution of juvenile virulence is sensitive to both demography and transmission pathway with higher virulence against juveniles being favored either when the transmission pathway is assortative (juveniles preferentially interact together) and the juvenile stage is long, or in contrast when the transmission pathway is disassortative and the juvenile stage is short. These results highlight the potentially profound effects of host stage structure on determining parasite virulence in nature. This new perspective may have broad implications for both understanding and managing disease severity.
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