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The ecology and immunogenetics of parasites in invasive species
Start date:2009-11-01
End date:2011-10-31
Project Acronym:EIGIS
Project status:Completed
Coordinator
| Organization name:CARDIFF UNIVERSITY | |
| Administrative contact | Address |
|
Name:Nick |
Newport Road CARDIFF UNITED KINGDOM Region:WALES GWENT, MID-SOUTH-WEST GLAMORGAN South Glamorgan |
| Tel:+44-2920870171 | |
| Fax:+44-2920874189 | |
| E-mail:Contact | |
| URL:http://www.cardiff.ac.uk | Organization Type: |
Description
Objective:
Invasive species are a major threat to biodiversity and human health because they often undergo unregulated population growth, putatively because they have escaped their predators; the enemy release hypothesis. However, parasites are also enemies and recent work has shown that invasive species lack a full parasite community. So we ask, does the reduced parasite community contribute to invasion success?
The first step is to undertake rigorous, replicated experiments that will empirically compare the parasite community of invaders versus their native counterparts. We will examine this with respect to the bank vole, a common woodland rodent in mainland UK that has recently become invasive in Ireland. We will experimentally manipulate specific parasites and simultaneously examine the vole population and parasite community interactions. We will describe the social network of the two populations and quantify the contact rates between bank voles and the native biota. Finally, we will investigate the co-evolutionary changes that occur as a function of changes in the parasite community.
We predict that invasive species will adapt to the loss of parasites by investing less in immunity and that this has a genetic basis and so we will investigate
* Are there genotypic differences between the native and invaded biota?
* Secondly do invasive species undergo evolutionary compensation of the immune system?
Finally, we draw comparisons between the expected changes in the invasive species immune system and that of the Hygiene Hypothesis which states that, in humans, a lack of childhood exposure to infectious agents leads to increased susceptibility to allergic diseases. As such we will investigate:
* Can invasive rodents be used as a model system for the hygiene hypothesis?
Achievements:
General information:
Project Details
Start date:2009-11-01
End date:2011-10-31
Duration:24 months
Project Reference:235636
Project cost:0 EURO
Project Funding:174702 EURO
Programme Acronym:
FP7-PEOPLE
Programme type:Seventh Framework Programme
Subprogramme Area:Marie Curie Action: "Intra-European Fellowships for Career Development"
Contract type:Intra-European Fellowships (IEF)
URL:
Subject index:Scientific Research, Employment issues
Other Indexes:Infections,Applied biology,Graph Theory,Medical sciences,Animal ethology,Population biology,Allergology,Social networks,Inasive species biology
Other participants
Record control number:92287
