Dispersal plays a main role in determining spatial dynamics, and both theory and empirical evidence indicate that evolutionary optima exist for constitutive or plastic dispersal behaviour. Plasticity in dispersal can be influenced by factors both internal (state-dependent) or external (context-dependent) to individuals. Parasitism is interesting in this context, as it can influence both types of host dispersal plasticity: individuals can disperse in response to internal infection status but might also respond to the presence of infected individuals around them. We still know little about the driving evolutionary forces of host dispersal plasticity, but a first requirement is the presence of a genetic basis on which natural selection can act. In this study, we used microcosm dispersal mazes to investigate plastic dispersal of 20 strains of the freshwater protist Paramecium caudatum in response to the bacterial parasite Holospora undulata. We additionally quantified the genetic component of the plastic responses, i.e. the heritability of state- and context-depended dispersal. We found that infection by the parasite can either increase or decrease dispersal of individual strains relative to the uninfected (state-dependent plasticity), and this to be heritable. We also found strain-specific change of dispersal of uninfected Paramecium when exposed to variable infection prevalence (context-dependent plasticity) with very low level of heritability. To our knowledge, this is the first explicit empirical demonstration and quantification of genetic variation of plastic dispersal in a host-parasite system, which could have important implications for meta-population and epidemiological dynamics. We discuss some of the underlying mechanisms of this variation and link our results to the existing theoretical models.
Host–parasite dynamics set the ecological theatre for the evolution of state‐ and context‐dependent dispersal in hosts
