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Fantastic news. EBIO has received a 4th NSF Graduate Fellowship!

Joseph R. Mihaljevic, currently at Washington University, will be joining our graduate program and working in Piet Johnson’s lab. The title of his project is Effects of Metacommunity Size on Host Diversity and Parasite Dilution.

Here is some further information from his proposal:

Many wildlife species are reservoirs for pathogens that affect other wildlife, livestock, and/or human health1. Since sudden increases in parasite prevalence are commonly associated with emergent epizootics1 – epidemic disease outbreaks in animal populations – understanding general patterns of parasite diversity and prevalence is an important challenge to community ecology. The dilution effect hypothesis predicts that increasing local diversity of parasite hosts can decrease the prevalence of certain parasites (e.g. fewer parasites per host) via, for example, increasing these parasites’ encounter rates with incompetent hosts2. Yet increasing the local diversity of hosts also yields a more locally diverse parasite community3. While these results are seemingly contradictory host diversity could have differential effects on parasite diversity and prevalence and, therefore, the probability of epizootics.

I will address: (1) How does metacommunity size affect local host diversity? and (2) Do these changes of local host diversity differentially affect parasite diversity and prevalence?