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The extensive research about pathogens shows that they can evolve within a month, whereas animal hosts such as humans take centuries to make large evolutionary changes. [5] Parasite virulence and host resistance are variables that strongly impact a pathogen's ability to replicate and be distributed to many hosts.
For example, exploitative interactions between a predator and prey can result in the extinction of the victim (the prey, in this case), as the predator, by definition, kills the prey, and thus reduces its population. [2] Another effect of these interactions is in the coevolutionary "hot" and "cold spots" put forth by geographic mosaic theory ...
Hosts and parasites exert reciprocal selective pressures on each other, which may lead to rapid reciprocal adaptation.For organisms with short generation times, host–parasite coevolution can be observed in comparatively small time periods, making it possible to study evolutionary change in real-time under both field and laboratory conditions.
A recently observed example has as protagonists M. xanthus (predator) and E. coli (prey) in which a parallel evolution of both species can be observed through genomic and phenotypic modifications, producing in future generations a better adaptation of one of the species that is counteracted by the evolution of the other, thus generating an arms ...
One example of a potent fungal animal pathogen are Microsporidia - obligate intracellular parasitic fungi that largely affect insects, but may also affect vertebrates including humans, causing the intestinal infection microsporidiosis. [77] Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, is transmitted by Ixodes ticks.
The loss of predators, that mitigate the ability for pathogen transmission, can increase the rate of disease transmission. [14] Human anthropogenic induced climate change is becoming problematic, as parasites and their associated diseases, can move to higher latitudes with increasing global temperatures. New diseases can therefore infect ...
The main subfields of evolutionary ecology are life history evolution, sociobiology (the evolution of social behavior), the evolution of interspecific interactions (e.g. cooperation, predator–prey interactions, parasitism, mutualism) and the evolution of biodiversity and of ecological communities.
Schistosoma mansoni, an endoparasite that lives in human tissue. Parasite-stress theory, or pathogen-stress theory, is a theory of human evolution proposing that parasites and diseases encountered by a species shape the development of species' values and qualities, proposed by researchers Corey Fincher and Randy Thornhill.