Community chest… of parasites
An assemblage that includes all parasite species found within a single individual host.
What is an infracommunity?
Disease ecology studies interactions between hosts and their pathogens in the context of the ________ and ________.
What is the environment and evolution?
Virulence is defined as this effect of infection on the host.
What is a reduction in host fitness?
Parasites may alter host behaviour, morphology, or physiology primarily to improve this outcome.
What is transmission?
Parasites are typically distributed among hosts in this non-random pattern.
What is aggregation?
This level includes all parasite species exploiting a particular host subpopulation (not just one individual).
What is a component community?
In John Snow’s study, identifying a shared water source revealed this type of disease transmission route.
What is environmental transmission?
This type of transmission moves parasites from parents to their offspring.
What is vertical transmission?
Type of transmission where manipulation helps parasites move up the food chain via predation.
What is trophic transmission?
The total number of parasite individuals of the same species within one host.
What is an infrapopulation?
An artificial assemblage describing the full set of parasite species infecting a host species across its entire geographic range.
What is a parasite fauna?
One Health integrates human health, non-human animal health, and this key factor.
What is the environment?
This metric represents the number of secondary infections produced by one infected individual.
What is the R₀ (basic reproduction number)?
An alternative explanation for host behavioural change is that it benefits the host by reducing infection damage.
What is an adaptive host response?
When one parasite species reduces the abundance of another, this type of response is observed.
What is a numerical response?
This key process (besides interspecific interactions) limits lower infrapopulation size.
What is mating opportunity?
Regarding habitat specialisation, this type of host species typically carries more parasites.
What is a generalist host species?
According to modern theory, virulence evolves to maximise this quantity.
What is parasite fitness?
These parasite-encoded agents can influence host phenotype at multiple biological levels.
What are manipulation factors?
This key ecological interaction can cause a shift in the realised niche of a parasite species.
What is competition?
This type of distribution model mathematically represents aggregation across infrapopulations.
What is a negative binomial distribution?
This ecological effect reduces infection risk when more free-living species are present.
What is the encounter-dilution effect?
Contrary to early “conventional wisdom,” optimal virulence often evolves to this relative level.
What is intermediate virulence?
This molecular-level strategy allows parasites to imitate host molecules and alter host processes.
What is molecular mimicry?
This type of specificity refers to how closely related the hosts of a parasite are.
What is phylogenetic specificity?