Pharmaceutical pollution alters the cost of bacterial infection and its relationship to pathogen load

The relationship between pathogen proliferation and the cost of infection experienced by a host drives the ecology and evolution of host-pathogen dynamics. While environmental factors can shape this relationship, there is currently limited knowledge on the consequences of emerging contaminants, such as pharmaceutical pollutants, for the commonly observed trade-off between a pathogen’s growth within the host and the damage it causes, termed its virulence. Here, we investigated how exposure to fluoxetine (Prozac), a commonly detected psychoactive pollutant, could alter this key relationship using the water flea Daphnia magna and its bacterial pathogen Pasteuria ramosa as a model system. Across a variety of fluoxetine concentrations, we found that fluoxetine shaped the damage a pathogen caused, such as the reduction in fecundity or intrinsic growth experienced by infected individuals, but with minimal change in average pathogen spore loads. Instead, fluoxetine modified the relationship bet..., , , # Data for: Pharmaceutical pollution alters the cost of bacterial infection and its relationship to pathogen load [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.6q573n63h](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.6q573n63h) This text document has information regarding the data files associated with Aulsebrook LC, Wong BBM & Hall MD (2023) Pharmaceutical pollution alters the cost of bacterial infection and its relationship to pathogen load. There are two CSV files in total: 1\)     Aulsebrook-2023-Offspring_Data.csv 2\)     Aulsebrook-2023-Size_Spores_Data.csv Below is a table that has the name of each data column and the corresponding definition of information within that column. | Column name | Definition | | :------------------------------------- | :-------------------------------------------...