Journal
BIOLOGY LETTERS
Volume 8, Issue 3, Pages 465-468Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2011.1075
Keywords
parasite infection; pathogen transmission; malaria risk; climate change; extrinsic incubation period; mortality
Categories
Funding
- NSF [EF-0914384]
- NIH-NIAID [U19AI089676-01]
- Pennsylvania Department of Health
- Division Of Environmental Biology
- Direct For Biological Sciences [0914384] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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The development rate of parasites and pathogens within vectors typically increases with temperature. Accordingly, transmission intensity is generally assumed to be higher under warmer conditions. However, development is only one component of parasite/pathogen life history and there has been little research exploring the temperature sensitivity of other traits that contribute to transmission intensity. Here, using a rodent malaria, we show that vector competence (the maximum proportion of infectious mosquitoes, which implicitly includes parasite survival across the incubation period) tails off at higher temperatures, even though parasite development rate increases. We also show that the standard measure of the parasite incubation period (i.e. time until the first mosquitoes within a cohort become infectious following an infected blood-meal) is incomplete because parasite development follows a cumulative distribution, which itself varies with temperature. Including these effects in a simple model dramatically alters estimates of transmission intensity and reduces the optimum temperature for transmission. These results highlight the need to understand the interactive effects of environmental temperature on multiple host-disease life-history traits and challenge the assumptions of many current disease models that ignore this complexity.
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