Predicting epidemic size and disease evolution in natural systems

Environmental change shapes disease ecology and evolution in numerous host-parasite systems through many different mechanisms. The complexity of natural host-parasite populations - in terms of host genetics, parasite genetics and environmental conditions - has hampered our ability to predict the future of disease. Improving this knowledge is of paramount importance, as climate change is causing more variable weather, which will impact on our ability to predict when epidemics occur and how severe they will be.
This project will combine field surveys, semi-natural outdoor experiments, and controlled lab experiments to collect data and build models to predict disease in a naturally coevolving host-parasite system (the crustacean Daphnia magna and its sterilizing bacterial parasite Pasteuria ramosa).
The NERC-funded Stirling Outdoor Disease Experiment (SODE) is an established long-term project where twenty replicate populations of a naturally coevolving host-parasite system are tracked across multiple epidemics. The host, Daphnia magna, is a freshwater crustacean that can reproduce both sexually and asexually, and the parasite, Pasteuria
ramosa, is a highly virulent environmentally transmitted bacterium that sterilizes its hosts. In SODE's first year, each population was seeded with an identical suite of host genotypes and dose of parasite transmission spores. SODE is generating a long-term data set that allows us to dissect the contribution of host genetics, parasite genetics and ambient