Given the commonness of parasites’ co-option of host behavior for transmission it is likely that much post-infection behavior in hosts will increase parasite transmission.
The past decades have seen mounting evidence that parasites alter their host’s behaviour in ways that benefit transmission, based on differences in the expression of behavioural traits between infected and control individuals, or on significant correlations between trait expression and infection levels.
Indeed, in many unrelated taxa of
parasites exploiting a broad taxonomic range of hosts, following
infection, the parasite alters the behaviour, or more generally the
phenotype, of its host in ways that benefit its own replication or
transmission (Poulin, 1995; Moore, 2002; Thomas et al., 2005).
Theory predicts that this manipulative strategy should evolve under
many different scenarios (Poulin, 1994; Parker et al., 2009; Vickery
and Poulin, 2010), and, indeed, examples from the natural world
now amount to a very long list.
For example, the parasitic nematode
Myrmeconema neotropicum, which must be transmitted from ant
intermediate hosts to frugivorous birds in order to complete its life
cycle, alters a suite of phenotypic traits in infected ants. The
parasite not only turns the ant’s abdomen bright red but also causes
the ant to find a patch of red berries on a tree branch, stay within
that patch, and maintain its abdomen raised at an angle close to
vertical, in order for it to convincingly mimic a small fruit and
deceive a bird (Yanoviak et al., 2008).
Poulin, R. (2013). Parasite manipulation of host personality and behavioural syndromes. The Journal of experimental biology, 216(1), 18-26.
see also
Barron, D. G., Gervasi, S. S., Pruitt, J. N., & Martin, L. B. (2015). Behavioral competence: how host behaviors can interact to influence parasite transmission risk. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 6, 35-40.
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