Complex interactions in the life cycle of a simple parasite shape the evolution of virulence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Evolutionary expectations about the virulence of parasites (i.e., the parasite-induced mortality rate of the host) often focus solely on the within-host transmission stage, overlooking the time spent between hosts and variations in transmission cycles. Moreover, the parasite growth rate within the host is closely linked to virulence. Here, we suggest that a simplified view of transmission and parasite evolution makes predicting how virulence will evolve difficult. We illustrate our ideas with a parasite with a simple life cycle, the microsporidian Vavraia culicis, which infects the mosquito Anopheles gambiae. We selected the parasite over six host generations for early or late host transmission, corresponding to shorter or longer time within the host. Selecting for late transmission increased their exploitation of the host, resulting in higher host mortality and a shorter life cycle with rapid infective spore production, comparatively to selection for early transmission. In response, hosts infected with late-selected spores shortened their life cycle and shifted to earlier reproduction. Using different host harm metrics, we demonstrate and discuss the pros and cons of using different measures of virulence. These and other findings emphasize the importance of considering the entire transmission cycle in studies of parasite evolution and raise concerns about how host density and social settings might influence virulence evolution.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
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".