Document Type
Article
Abstract
A growing body of research is focused on the extinction of parasite species in response to host endangerment and declines. Beyond the loss of parasite species richness, host extinction can impact apparent parasite host specificity, as measured by host richness or the phylogenetic distances among hosts. Such impacts on the distribution of parasites across the host phylogeny can have knock-on effects that may reshape the adaptation of both hosts and parasites, ultimately shifting the evolutionary landscape underlying the potential for emergence and the evolution of virulence across hosts. Here, we examine how the reshaping of host phylogenies through extinction may impact the host specificity of parasites, and offer examples from historical extinctions, present-day endangerment, and future projections of biodiversity loss. We suggest that an improved understanding of the impact of host extinction on contemporary host–parasite interactions may shed light on core aspects of disease ecology, including comparative studies of host specificity, virulence evolution in multi-host parasite systems, and future trajectories for host and parasite biodiversity.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Infectious disease macroecology: parasite diversity and dynamics across the globe’.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Publication Info
Published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Volume 376, Issue 1837, 2021.
APA Citation
Farrell, M. J., Park, A. W., Cressler, C. E., Dallas, T., Huang, S., Mideo, N., Morales-Castilla, I., Davies, T. J., & Stephens, P. (2021). The ghost of hosts past: Impacts of host extinction on parasite specificity. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 376(1837), 20200351. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0351
Rights
© 2021 The Authors.
Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.