The coevolution of parasite virulence, and host investment in constitutive and induced defense.

Abstract

Given their ubiquity in nature and their importance to human and agricultural health it is important to gain a better understanding of the drivers of the evolution of infectious disease. Across vertebrates, invertebrates and plants, defence mechanisms can be expressed either constitutively (always present and costly) or induced (activated and potentially costly only upon infection). Theory has shown that this distinction has important implications to the evolution of defence due to differences in their impact on both individual fitness and the feedback of the population level epidemiological outcomes such as prevalence. However, despite the fact that pathogens evolve in response to host immunity and that this can have important implications to the evolution of host defence, the implications of coevolution on constitutive and induced immunity have not been examined. Here we show theoretically how and when incorporating host-parasite coevolution between host defences and parasite growth strategies plays an important role in determining the optimum outcome. A key result is that whether the parasite affects host reproduction critically impacts host-parasite coevolution; when the parasite impacts fecundity, selection on the host is largely geared towards minimizing reproductive costs, through reducing investment in reproductively costly constitutive defense when the parasite prevalence is low, but also by investing in immunity to avoid infection or recover when prevalence is high. Our work emphasizes the importance of coevolution and epidemiological feedbacks to the coevolution of hosts and parasites and provides testable predictions of the determinants of constitutive verses induced defence.