The evolution of host defence to parasitism in fluctuating environments

Given rapidly changing environments, it is important for us to understand how the evolution of host defence responds to fluctuating environments. Here we present the first theoretical study of evolution of host resistance to parasitism in a classic epidemiological model where the host birth rate varies seasonally. We show that this form of seasonality has clear qualitative and quantitative impacts on the evolution of resistance. When the host can recover from infection, it evolves a lower level of defence when the amplitude is high. However, when recovery is absent, the host increases its defence for higher amplitudes. Between these different behaviours we find a region of parameter space that allows evolutionary bistability. When this occurs, the level of defence the host evolves depends on initial conditions, and in some cases a switch between attractors can lead to different periods in the population dynamics at each of the evolutionary stable strategies. Crucially, we find that evolutionary behaviour found in a constant environment for this model doesn’t always hold for hosts with highly variable birth rates. Hence we argue that seasonality must be taken into account if we want to make predictions about evolutionary trends in real-world host-parasite systems.