Zoology Department Seminar: From worms to polar bears: pathogen spread and virulence in a warming world

Our Departmental Seminars run weekly on Thursdays during term time. They cover recent research on a wide variety of topics from evolutionary genetics through behavioural ecology to ecology and natural history.  Please click here for a list of all of this term's seminars.

Everyone in Zoology is invited, and Part II undergraduate zoologists are particularly encouraged to attend. 

Speaker:  Professor Kala C. King, University of British Columbia

Abstract: 

Climate change is expanding the geographic range of many infectious diseases, increasing the odds of host jumps into new species. The role that temperature plays in mediating these emerging interactions, at the point of establishment and across evolutionary time, remain unclear. Is a warmer world a sicker world? 

In this talk, I will show that my group has tested fundamental principles on the effects of experimental (ecologically-relevant) temperatures on the ecology and evolution of pathogen virulence. We find that endemic pathogens will be more virulent at higher temperatures using comparative analyses across the tree of life, but in selection experiments with Caenorhabditis elegans nematodes, emerging pathogens can also evolve to do more harm. Lastly, I will show genomic data from the field revealing the role that climate change is playing in the evolutionary emergence of zoonoses in vulnerable species in the Arctic. Ultimately, understanding the evolutionary biology of pathogens is essential to mitigating against the devastation of disease in a warming world.