Deeply conserved susceptibility in a multi‐host, multi‐parasite system

Abstract

Variation in susceptibility is ubiquitous in multi-host, multi-parasite assemblages, and can have profound implications for ecology and evolution in these systems. The extent to which susceptibility to parasites is phylogenetically conserved among hosts can be revealed by analysing diverse regional communities. We screened for haemosporidian parasites in 3983 birds representing 40 families and 523 species, spanning~4500 m elevation in the tropical Andes. To quantify the influence of host phylogeny on infection status, we applied Bayesian phylogenetic multilevel models that included a suite of environmental, spatial, temporal, life history and ecological predictors. We found evidence of deeply conserved susceptibility across the avian tree; host phylogeny explained substantial variation in infection status, and results were robust to phylogenetic uncertainty. Our study suggests that susceptibility is governed, in part, by conserved, latent aspects of anti-parasite defence. This demonstrates the importance of deep phylogeny for understanding present-day ecological interactions.

An inverse latitudinal gradient in infection probability and phylogenetic diversity for Leucocytozoon blood parasites in New World birds

“…Contrary to previous studies demonstrating an increase of prevalence with increasing elevation across the tropical Andes (Barrow et al, 2019;Galen & Witt, 2014;González et al, 2014;Lotta et al, 2016), we have shown no effect of altitude (Currie & Adler, 2008;McCreadie, Adler, & Hamada, 2005).…”

“…This allowed for more precise estimation of regression coefficients than using a single consensus tree and was considered more appropriate than running sequential models across different trees. Finally, the β coefficients in Equation (2) (Barrow et al, 2019;Lutz et al, 2015). As sex information was missing for 1,424 birds, we imputed these missing values using…”

Host phylogeny matters: Examining sources of variation in infection risk by blood parasites across a tropical montane bird community in India

“…To better understand the effect of host ecological factors, research needs to account for host phylogenetic relationships in driving susceptibility to infection and subsequent disease transmission. In this study, we demonstrate the importance of host phylogenetic relationships in in uencing variation in infection risk to avian haemosporidians, which is consistent with previous work by Barrow et al (2019). Higher magnitude of phylogenetic signal in the case of Haemoproteus compared to Plasmodium parasites tends to be coherent with their host speci city patterns in our community [32].…”

“…Although several factors have been proposed to explain variation in parasite prevalence and infection risk among individuals and host species [13,14,41,47,50,51], it remains unclear whether the role of host ecological traits are generally predictable or whether they are idiosyncratic across hosts, parasites and environmental conditions and context dependent. Additionally, evolutionary history of host species can confound the relationship between ecological traits and parasite infection risk as closely related species are more likely to share risk factors compared to non-related host species [52]. Despite this, surprisingly few studies have taken evolutionary history of the hosts into account and thus, the importance of host evolutionary history in predicting infection risk is less well understood.…”

Robust geographical determinants of infection prevalence and a contrasting latitudinal diversity gradient for haemosporidian parasites in Western Palearctic birds

“…Both variables were obtained at 10 × 10 km resolution using the MODISTools R package (Tuck et al., 2014) and included as mean values, averaged across months when peak haemosporidian transmission is likely to occur in our study region: May–August. Finally, we included elevation (meters above sea level) as a predictor based on previous evidence that high‐elevation environments show increased prevalence of Leucocytozoon parasites (Barrow et al., 2019; Galen & Witt, 2014). Elevation for each site was extracted from Amazon Web Services (https://registry.opendata.aws/terrain-tiles/) using functions in the elevatr r package (Hollister & Shah, 2017).…”