Trade‐offs play pivotal roles in the ecology and evolution of natural populations. However, trade‐offs are probably not static, invariant relationships. Instead, ecological factors can shift, alter, or reverse the relationships underlying trade‐offs and create critical genotype × environment (G × E) interactions. But which ecological factors alter trade‐offs or create G × E interactions, and why (mechanistically) do they do th...

The “dilution effect” concept in disease ecology offers the intriguing possibility that clever manipulation of less competent hosts could reduce disease prevalence in populations of more competent hosts. The basic concept is straightforward: host species vary in suitability (competence) for parasites, and disease transmission decreases when there are more incompetent hosts interacting with vectors or removing free‐living stage...

Epidemiologists increasingly realize that species interactions (e.g. selective predation) can determine when epidemics start and end. We hypothesize here that resource quality can also strongly influence disease dynamics: epidemics can be inhibited when resource quality for hosts is too poor and too good. In three lakes, resource quality for the zooplankton host ( Daphnia dentifera ) was poor when fungal epidemics ( Metschniko...

Species interactions may profoundly influence disease outbreaks. However, disease ecology has only begun to integrate interactions between hosts and their food resources (foraging ecology) despite that hosts often encounter their parasites while feeding. A zooplankton–fungal system illustrated this central connection between foraging and transmission. Using experiments that varied food density for Daphnia hosts, density of fun...

We investigated the changes in life histories imposed on the water flea, Daphnia magna, due to biochemical and mineral limitations. Phosphorus‐deficient Scenedesmus obliquus were incubated with or without a single essential fatty acid, eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA). Additionally, the algae were spiked with dissolved phosphorus to create a range of C: P ratios from 600 to 200. This procedure created the possibility to study the i...

The differences in the impact of two major groups of herbivorous zooplankton (Cladocera and Copepoda) on summer phytoplankton in a mesotrophic lake were studied. Field experiments were performed in which phytoplankton were exposed to different densities of two major types of herbivorous zooplankton, cladocerans and copepods. Contrary to expectation, neither of the two zooplankton groups significantly reduced phytoplankton biom...