Abstract
Parasites play key roles in regulating aquatic ecosystems, yet the impact of climate warming on their ecology and disease transmission remains poorly understood. Isolating the effect of warming is challenging as transmission involves multiple interacting species and potential intraspecific variation in temperature responses of one or more of these species. Here, we leverage a wide-ranging mosquito species and its facultative parasite as a model system to investigate the impact of temperature on host–parasite interactions and disease transmission. We conducted a common garden experiment measuring parasite growth and infection rates at seven temperatures using 12 field-collected parasite populations and a single mosquito population. We find that both free-living growth rates and infection rates varied with temperature, which were highest at 18–24.5 °C and 13 °C, respectively. Further, we find intraspecific variation in peak performance temperature reflecting patterns of local thermal adaptation—parasite populations from warmer source environments typically had higher thermal optima for free-living growth rates. For infection rates, we found a significant interaction between parasite population and nonlinear effects of temperature. These findings underscore the need to consider both host and parasite thermal responses, as well as intraspecific variation in thermal responses, when predicting the impacts of climate change on disease in aquatic ecosystems.
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Data availability
The datasets and code used in the study have been deposited on Dryad at https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.g79cnp5w6.
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Acknowledgements
This work was funded by the National Science Foundation (DEB-2011147, with the Fogarty International Center and 2208947 Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in Biology Program), the National Institutes of Health (R35GM133439, R01AI168097, and R01AI102918), the Stanford King Center on Global Development, Woods Institute for the Environment, Center for Innovation in Global Health, the Terman Award, The Rose Hills Foundation, and the Bing-Mooney Fellowship. We would like to thank the staff at Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, and the many vector control officials who provided invaluable assistance with field collections and lab rearing protocols, including Bret Barner, Nate McConnell, Angie Nakano, Andrew Rivera, and Greg Williams. We would like to thank Allie Lee, Dylan Loth, Isabel Delwel, Mallory Harris, and Desire Nalukwago for their assistance in setting up the experiment, and other members of the Mordecai Lab for their valuable discussions and feedback on the manuscript.
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This work was supported by the following organizations: Division of Environmental Biology with grant number 2011147; Directorate for Biological Sciences with grant number 2208947; National Institutes of Health with grant numbers R35GM133439, R01AI168097 and R01AI102918; Rose Hills Foundation; Bing-Mooney Fellowship; Stanford King Center on Global Development; Woods Institute for the Environment.
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KL, SI, and EM originally formulated the idea, KL, JF, and LC conducted fieldwork, KL and SI conducted the experiments and statistical analysis, SI and KL wrote the first draft of the manuscript, and all authors contributed to writing and revising the manuscript.
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Communicated by Tara Merrill and Jason Hoverman.
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Ismail, S., Farner, J., Couper, L. et al. Temperature and intraspecific variation affect host–parasite interactions. Oecologia 204, 389–399 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-023-05481-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-023-05481-z