The differential habitat use leads to individual variation in fitness has seldom been studied empirically in natural populations of long‐lived mammals.This is the case notwithstanding the surge in studies endeavoring to capture evolutionary change in such populations. The unmanaged Soay sheep in St. Kilda, Scotland, have been the subject of genetic, ecological and parasitological study since 1985, with the island providing ideal "natural laboratory" settings. We implement integral projection models to analyze the joint temporal dynamics of the plant, sheep (host) and parasite populations to how quantify hosts’diet influences within-host and between-host disease processes.
Results/Conclusions
Our results answer the question of how the plane of nutrition affects sheep’s ability to tolerate nematode burden and how it indirectly shapes the evolution of parasite traits. Thus, using the role of habitat-use (access to differential plant quality and availability) we disentangle host-parasite dynamics to answer the cross-scale question of how habitat shapes host heterogeneity and modes of defense, and in turn, how these affect parasite transmission. This study system is simultaneously relevant to wild host-helminth systems and to the interactions of domesticated sheep with their economically important eukaryotic parasites: intestinal nematodes.