Parasite‐mediated changes in host traits alter food web dynamics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Parasites commonly alter the phenotype of their hosts, thereby influencing competitive and consumer–resource interactions. This could trigger a cascade effect on the dynamics of biological communities, but the role of parasites in ecosystem processes is poorly understood. In this study, we investigate how parasite‐induced trait modifications shape the dynamics of a complex lake food web using an allometric trophic network model (ATN). We simulated infections of stage‐structured fish host populations via increased maintenance costs and predation risk. Our results show that host trait modifications can significantly impact host demography, with stage‐specific biomass declines up to 60%. However, less severely affected host stages buffered these effects and sustained the population. Importantly, host biomass decline altered the dynamics of species interactions and these effects cascaded through the entire community, with biomass changes observed at all trophic levels. Our findings emphasize the importance of incorporating both indirect parasite effects and host life history in ecological network studies for more realistic simulations of community dynamics.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
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".