Theory of the evolution of pathogen specialization suggests that a specialist pathogen gains high fitness in one host, but this comes with fitness loss in other hosts. By contrast, a generalist pathogen does not achieve high fitness in any host, but gains ecological fitness by exploiting different hosts, and has higher fitness than specialists in non-specialized hosts. As a result, specialist pathogens are predicted to have greater variation in fitness across hosts, and generalists would have lower fitness variation across hosts. We test these hypotheses by measuring pathogen replicative fitness as within-host viral loads from the onset of infection to the beginning of virus clearance, using the rhabdovirus infectious...
Categories: Data;
Tags: Aquatic Biology,
Ecology,
Pacific Northwest,
RNA viruses,
USGS Science Data Catalog (SDC), All tags...
Wildlife Disease,
farming,
generalism,
pathogen,
replication,
salmonids,
specialization,
tradeoffs,
viral load, Fewer tags
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