Interactions between hosts and parasites have been hypothesized to cause winnerless coevolution, called Red Queen dynamics. The canonical Red Queen ...
Host-Parasite Red Queen Dynamics with Phase-Locked Rare Genotypes Jomar F. Rabajante (University of the Philippines Los Baños; Shizuoka University Japan), Jerrold M. Tubay (University of the Philippines Los Baños; Shizuoka University Japan), Hiromu Ito (Shizuoka University Japan), Takashi Uehara (Nagoya College; Shizuoka University Japan), Satoshi Kakishima (Shizuoka University Japan), Satoru Morita (Shizuoka University Japan), Jin Yoshimura (Shizuoka University Japan; Chiba University; State University of New York – College of Environmental Science and Forestry), Dieter Ebert (University of Basel Switzerland)
Interactions between hosts and parasites have been hypothesized to cause winnerless coevolution, called Red Queen dynamics. The canonical Red Queen dynamics assume that all interacting genotypes of hosts and parasites undergo cyclic changes in abundance through negative frequency-dependent selection, which means that any genotype could become frequent at some stage. Red Queen hypothesis contributes new insights to the fields of parasitology, epidemiology (e.g., antibiotic resistance) and evolutionary ecology, especially in investigating antagonistic interaction of multi-type species in marine microbial communities (e.g., bacteriophage predation) and invertebrate-parasite systems (e.g., infection of Daphnia magna by Pasteuria ramosa).
However, this prediction cannot explain why many rare genotypes stay rare in natural host-parasite systems. To investigate this, we build a mathematical model with type-III functional response involving multi-host and multi-parasite genotypes. In a deterministic and controlled environment, Red Queen dynamics occur between two genotypes undergoing cyclic dominance changes, while the rest of the genotypes remain subordinate for long periods of time in phase-locked, synchronized dynamics with low amplitude.
However, introduction of stochastic physical-environmental noise in the model can allow the subordinate cyclic host and parasite types to replace dominant cyclic types as new players in the Red Queen dynamics.
The factors that influence the two evolutionary switching modes (Red Queen switching and switching due to noise) are birth rate of hosts, mortality rate of parasites, inter-host competition, specificity of parasitism, and degree of stochastic noise. Our model can for the first time explain the persistence of rare, hardly cycling genotypes in populations (e.g., marine microbial communities) undergoing hostparasite coevolution. Our theory can also explain temporal diversity of species. References: Rabajante J.F., Tubay J.M., Ito H., Uehara T., Kakishima S., Morita S., Yoshimura J. and Ebert D. 2016. Hostparasite Red Queen dynamics with phase-locked rare genotypes. Science Advances (AAAS), 2(3): e1501548. Rabajante J.F., Tubay J.M., Uehara T., Morita S., Ebert D. and Yoshimura J. 2015. Red Queen dynamics in multi-host and multi-parasite interaction system. Scientific Reports (Nature Publishing Group), 5: 10004.