Data from: Costs of crowding for the transmission potential in malaria parasites

The utility of using evolutionary and ecological frameworks to understand
the dynamics of infectious diseases is gaining increasing recognition.
However, integrating evolutionary ecology and infectious disease
epidemiology is challenging because within-host dynamics can have
counterintuitive consequences for between-host transmission, especially
for vector-borne parasites. A major obstacle to linking within- and
between-host processes is that the drivers of the relationships between
the density, virulence, and fitness of parasites are poorly understood. By
experimentally manipulating the intensity of rodent malaria (Plasmodium
berghei) infections in Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes under different
environmental conditions, we show that parasites experience substantial
density-dependent fitness costs because crowding reduces both parasite
proliferation and vector survival. We then use our data to predict how
interactions between parasite density and vector environmental conditions
shape within-vector processes and onward disease transmission. Our model
predicts that density-dependent processes can have substantial and
unexpected effects on the transmission potential of vector-borne disease,
which should be considered in the development and evaluation of
transmission-blocking interventions.