How specialists can be generalists: resolving the “parasite paradox” and implications for emerging infectious disease

By Salvatore J. Agosta, N. Janz, Daniel R. Brooks. 2010

277 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The parasite paradox arises from the dual observations that parasites (broadly construed, including phy- tophagous insects) are resource specialists with restricted host ranges, and yet shifts onto relatively unrelated hosts are common in the phylogenetic diversification of parasite lineages and directly observable in ecological time. We synthe- size the emerging solution to this paradox: phenotypic flexibility and phylogenetic conservatism in traits related to resource use, grouped under the term ecological fitting, provide substantial opportunities for rapid host switching in changing environments, in the absence of the evolution of novel host-utilization capabilities. We discuss mechanisms behind ecological fitting, its implications for defining specialists and generalists, and briefly review empirical examples of host shifts in the context of ecological fitting. We conclude that host shifts via ecological fitting provide the fuel for the expansion phase of the recently proposed oscillation hypothesis of host range and speciation, and, more generally, the generation of novel combinations of interacting species within the geographic mosaic theory of coevolution. Finally, we conclude that taxon pulses, driven by climate change and large-scale ecological perturbation are drivers of biotic mixing and resultant ecological fitting, which leads to increased rates of rapid host switching, including the agents of Emerging Infectious Disease.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Genetics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/717d25d23d4a1e6b94ae7ea83e55b0ac9719919b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecological Modeling

1. Simone Fattorini
2. R. Dennis
3. Jürgen Dengler

In Ecology

1. Simone Fattorini
2. Daniel R. Brooks
3. K. Galbreath
4. R. Dennis

In Genetics

1. E. Hoberg
2. Daniel R. Brooks
3. L. Dapporto
4. K. Galbreath
5. R. Dennis
6. Zi Wang
7. Stefanie Sabrina Jegelka

Citations in the corpus

• An evolutionary ecology perspective to address forest pathology challenges of today and tomorrow (2016, unknown): “, that infectivity traits evolved in a host interaction in its place of origin would allow the pathogen to be able to infect a closely related host species in its area of introduction (Agosta and Klemens 2008; Agosta et al. 2010).”
• The generalism-specialism debate: the role of generalists in the life and death of species (2011, background): “For a new species to spontaneously access new hosts, it must either: (1) choose (related) plants with very similar defences to those of the ancestral host plant; (2) exploit plant families using broadcast general defences easily overcome or (3) possess sufficient genetic variability (thus large enou”
• Finding Them Before They Find Us: Informatics, Parasites, and Environments in Accelerating Climate Change (2014, methodology): “An implicit feature is the assumption of a large sloppy fitness space (Agosta, 2006; Agosta and Klemens, 2008, 2009; Agosta et al., 2010) represented by an array of potential hosts from which most pathogens had been historically precluded by circumstances of time, space, and origin.”