Individuals vary in their response to natural enemies and this variation has an important effect on the relationship between consumers and resources. Animals and plants can tolerate or resist the attacks of their enemies and enemies must shape their attack strategies to optimize survival and reproduction. A challenge in the ecology of species interactions is to identify the factors responsible for this individual variation. At the heart of host-parasite interactions lie the immunological processes that allow the host to respond to an infection and the life history strategies that allow parasites to escape host immune defenses and to maximize survival and transmission. This interdisciplinary project integrates recent progress in the immunology of tolerance and resistance with the theory of food web dynamics to examine how the contrasting responses of tolerance and resistance influence parasite development and fecundity within hosts and how these responses affect transmission and long term persistence at host population level. The investigators aim to develop one of the first population-level studies of tolerance-resistance as defined at the molecular level. This will be achieved by a combination of detailed laboratory studies, field monitoring and mathematical modeling.
By identifying the molecular bases for species interactions, this project will provide novel insights into host-parasite interactions and will enhance understanding of community structure, food web dynamics and biodiversity. Parasites represent serious health and economic threats for animals and humans and an appreciation of the fundamental processes of host-parasite interaction will accelerate development of alternative measures for parasite control. Finally, this highly interdisciplinary study offers numerous opportunities to train graduate and undergraduate students and postdoctoral researchers in multidisciplinary, quantitative approaches and analyses.
