Interactions between chytrids cause variable infection strategies on harmful algal bloom forming species
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cyanobacteria have a great diversity of natural enemies, such as herbivores and pathogens, including fungal pathogens within the Chytridiomycota (chytrids). While these pathogens have been previously described on a select number of cyanobacterial hosts and are suspected to play a significant ecological role, little is understood about species interactions and how competition between parasites can affect epidemic development and bloom formation. Here, three Planktothrix agardhii isolates from Sandusky Bay, Lake Erie (OH, USA) were challenged in monoculture and polyculture against infection by three isolates (C1, C2, C10) of their obligate chytrid fungal pathogen, Rhizophydiales sp. The chytrid isolates were inoculated as single isolates or a mixture of up to three different isolates. In monoculture, host isolates were characterized as highly susceptible (P. agardhii 1030), moderately susceptible (P. agardhii 1808) or mostly resistant (P. agardhii 1801). Co-infection of chytrid isolates on the highly susceptible host isolate had an additive effect on chytrid prevalence, leading to a culture crash where 2 or 3 chytrid isolates were present. Co-infection of chytrid isolates on the moderately susceptible and mostly resistant isolates had no effect on chytrid infection outcome or prevalence compared to infection with a single isolate. In polyculture, the effect on host growth was most significant in the single chytrid isolate treatment, which was attenuated with the addition of mixed chytrid treatments. Genetic analysis of the resulting population after the experimental period showed a tendency for the chytrid isolate C1 and P. agardhii 1801 to dominate in mixed population samples. Two different interspecific interactions seem to be in play; varied parasite infection strategies allow for the amplification of infection prevalence due to mixed chytrids in a susceptible monoculture, or competition allows for the dominance of a single chytrid isolate in monoculture and the reduction of infection prevalence in a host polyculture. This work thus highlights how interactions between chytrid infections can change the course of epidemic development and harmful algal bloom formation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.006 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".