Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 105, Issue 52, Pages 20786-20791Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0809558105
Keywords
tolerance; resistance; genetic variation; evolutionary branching
Categories
Funding
- Natural Environment Research Council
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Tolerance and resistance provide hosts with two distinct defense strategies against parasitism. In resistance the hosts fight'' the parasite directly, whereas in tolerance the hosts fight the disease by ameliorating the damage that infection causes. There is increasing recognition that the two mechanisms may exhibit very different evolutionary behaviors. Although empirical work has often noted considerable variance in tolerance within hosts, theory has predicted the fixation of tolerance due to positive frequency dependence through a feedback with disease prevalence. Here we reconcile these findings through a series of dynamic game theoretical models. We emphasize that there is a crucial distinction between tolerance to the effects of disease-induced mortality and tolerance to the effect of the disease-induced reductions in fecundity. Only mortality tolerance has a positive effect on parasite fitness, whereas sterility tolerance is neutral and may therefore result in polymorphisms. The nature of the costs to defense and their relationship to trade-offs between resistance and tolerance are crucial in determining the likelihood of variation, whereas the co-evolution of the parasite will not affect diversity. Our findings stress that it is important to measure the effects of different mechanisms on characteristics that affect the epidemiology of the parasite to completely understand the evolutionary dynamics of defense.
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