Authors
A Fenton1; 1 University of Liverpool, UK Discussion
Although we know coinfecting parasites can strongly affect each other within individual hosts, we know little about the consequences of those within-host interactions for the between-host transmission dynamics of those parasites. I will describe results from a wild mammal host population (UK wood mice) and their diverse parasite communities which show, firstly through drug treatment experiments, that the dominant nematode in the system interacts strongly with a coinfecting ‘subordinate’ parasite, suppressing its abundance within individual hosts. Secondly, through spatiotemporal analyses, we provide evidence of localised ‘coinfection-mediated transmission modification’, whereby that within-host interaction suppresses the transmission potential of the subordinate parasite, reducing its force of infection on neighbouring hosts, but only over limited spatial scales. This suggests that the effects of within-host coinfection interactions can ripple out to shape parasite transmission dynamics within local neighbourhoods, potentially altering the spatiotemporal dynamics of those parasites.
