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Some like it hotter: trematode transmission under changing temperature conditions

  • Global change ecology – original research
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Abstract

Climate change-related increases in temperature will influence the interactions between organisms, including the infection dynamics of parasites in ecosystems. The distribution and transmission of parasites are expected to increase with warmer temperature, but to what extent this will affect closely related parasite taxa living in sympatry is currently impossible to predict, due to our extremely limited understanding of the interspecific variation in transmission potential among parasite species in changing ecosystems. Here, we analyse the transmission patterns of four trematode species from the New Zealand mudsnail Potamopyrgus antipodarum with different life cycles and transmission strategies under two temperature scenarios, simulating current and future warmer temperatures. In a comparative experimental study, we investigated the effects of temperature on the productivity, movement and survival of the parasites’ transmission stages (cercariae) to quantify the net effect of temperature on their overall transmission potential. Our results show that increases in temperature positively affect cercarial transmission dynamics, yet these impacts varied considerably between the cercariae of different trematode species, depending on their host-searching behaviour. These different species-specific transmission abilities as well as the varying individual patterns of productivity, activity and longevity are likely to have far-reaching implications for disease dynamics in changing ecosystems, since increases in temperature can shift parasite community structure. Due to the parasites’ capacity to regulate the functioning of whole ecological communities and their potential impact as disease agents, understanding these species-specific parasite transmission traits remains a fundamental requirement to predict parasite dynamics under changing environmental conditions.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Clément Lagrue, Olwyn Friesen and Micha Rosenkranz for help in the field and laboratory, and to Sheri Johnson and Anne Besson for providing access to EthoVision. We thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on our manuscript.

Funding

CS has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant agreement No. 839635 TPOINT, and from the German Research Foundation (DFG, SE 2728/1-1).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Zoology, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

    Christian Selbach & Robert Poulin

  2. Department of Biology, Aquatic Biology, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Christian Selbach

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  1. Christian Selbach
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  2. Robert Poulin
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CS and RP conceived and designed the experiments, analysed the data and wrote the manuscript. CS performed the experiments.

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Correspondence to Christian Selbach.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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All applicable institutional and/or national guidelines for the care and use of animals were followed.

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Communicated by Lisa Belden.

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Selbach, C., Poulin, R. Some like it hotter: trematode transmission under changing temperature conditions. Oecologia 194, 745–755 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-020-04800-y

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