Individuals differ in the nature of the immune responses they produce, affecting disease susceptibility and ultimately health and fitness. These differences have been hypothesized to have an origin in events experienced early in life that then affect trajectories of immune development and responsiveness. Here, we investigate how early‐life immune expression profiles influence life history outcomes in a natural population of fi...

Apicomplexans are a protozoan phylum of obligate parasites which may be highly virulent during acute infections, but may also persist as chronic infections which appear to have little fitness cost. Babesia microti is an apicomplexan haemoparasite that, in immunocompromised individuals, can cause severe, potentially fatal disease. However, in its natural host, wild field voles ( Microtus agrestis ), it exhibits chronic infectio...

Aim The spatial structure of a population can strongly influence the dynamics of infectious diseases, yet rarely is the underlying structure quantified. A case in point is plague, an infectious zoonotic disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis . Plague dynamics within the Central Asian desert plague focus have been extensively modelled in recent years, but always with strong uniformity assumptions about the distribution...

Ecology Letters (2012) Abstract A core concept of infectious disease epidemiology is the abundance threshold, below which an infection is unable to invade or persist. There have been contrasting theoretical predictions regarding the nature of this threshold for vector‐borne diseases, but for infections with an invertebrate vector, it is common to assume a threshold defined by the ratio of vector and host abundances. Here, we s...

Individuals in natural populations are frequently exposed to a wide range of pathogens. Given the diverse profile of gene products involved in responses to different types of pathogen, this potentially results in complex pathogen‐specific selection pressures acting on a broad spectrum of immune system genes in wild animals. Thus far, studies into the evolution of immune genes in natural populations have focused almost exclusiv...