Evolutionary Ecology

, Volume 20, Issue 6, pp 603–616 | Cite as

The dynamics of parasite incidence across host species

Original Paper
First Online:

Abstract

Whilst it is well known that many parasites occasionally switch from one host species to another and thus spread within a host clade, the patterns of spread and the observed heterogeneity in parasite incidence between host taxa are not well understood. Here, we develop a simple stochastic model as a first attempt to understand these ‘incidence dynamics’. Based on the empirically supported assumption that the probability of successful transmission from an infected to a new host species declines with increasing genetic distance between them, we study the impact of different phylogenetic histories of the host clade on the pattern of spread and the average incidence of the parasites. Our results suggest that host phylogeny alone can lead to heterogeneous parasite incidence.

Keywords

Horizontal transmission Host switching Phylogeny Transinfection Tree topology Wolbachia 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

We thank Sylvain Charlat, Max Reuter, Tine Huyse, Arndt Telschow, Francis Jiggins, John Jaenike, and two anonymous reviewers for useful comments on the manuscript. We acknowledge support from a UCL Graduate School Research Scholarship to JE and grants from the NERC to GH.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2006

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Biology UCLLondonUK

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