Ongoing
Rick Relyea
Anthropogenic activities can dramatically alter natural systems, including placing selection pressures on entire species assemblages. There have been repeated calls to address how anthropogenic environments and evolutionary responses jointly influence hosts and parasites. Our goal is to explore how evolved responses to pesticides across an environmental landscape affect the disease ecology of hosts and parasites using a system of amphibians, snails, and aquatic parasites. This work takes a broad, integrative approach to how evolutionary responses to novel, anthropogenic environments alter ecological interactions in communities, including the important interplay of ecological and evolutionary processes in the field of disease ecology.