Speaker: Dr. Caroline Amoroso
Avoidance behavior represents a powerful first defense for hosts in their repertoire of strategies to fight parasites. Most research on avoidance behavior has asked how parasite avoidance trades off with other aspects of animals’ ecology, including predator avoidance or resource acquisition. This talk starts by using this approach to investigate how wild lemurs in a dry forest in Madagascar avoid parasite risk in their selection of water sources. The talk then takes initial steps in bridging the gap from this ecological perspective to an evolutionary one, considering basic assumptions for avoidance to evolve by natural selection, the fitness costs of avoidance, and the potential for avoidance to impact the evolution of other host defenses.
The talk outlines several completed and planned research projects that integrate theory with experiments in the model nematode host Caenorhabditis elegans and bacterial pathogen Serratia marcescens, with the goal to develop a tractable path for studying parasite avoidance behavior in an evolutionary context.