ArticleEvolution; international journal of organic evolution2024
Genetic variation in parasite avoidance, yet no evidence for constitutive fitness costs.
Article in Evolution; international journal of organic evolution, 2024. 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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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed, 8 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Wild strains reveal natural variation in C. elegans avoidance behaviors.G3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2025Article
- Host avoidance and resistance vary independently and are specific to parasite genotype.The Journal of animal ecology · 2025Article
- Avoidance of infection.Current biology : CB · 2025Article
- Genetic Variation in Trophic Avoidance Behaviour Shows Fruit Flies are Generally Attracted to Bacterial Substrates.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Behavioral avoidance of parasites is a widespread strategy among animal hosts and in human public health. Avoidance has repercussions for both individual and population-level infection risk. Although most cases of parasite avoidance are viewed as adaptive, there is little evidence that the basic assumptions of evolution by natural selection are met. This study addresses this gap by testing whether there is a heritable variation in parasite avoidance behavior. We quantified behavioral avoidance of the bacterial parasite Serratia marcescens for 12 strains of the nematode host Caenorhabditis elegans. We found that these strains varied in their magnitude of avoidance, and we estimated the broad-sense heritability of this behavior to be in the range of 11%-26%. We then asked whether avoidance carries a constitutive fitness cost. We did not find evidence of one. Rather, strains with higher avoidance had higher fitness, measured as population growth rate. Together, these results direct future theoretical and empirical work to identify the forces maintaining genetic variation in parasite avoidance.
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Registered trials
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