Data from: Invest more and die faster: the life history of a parasite on intensive farms

Organisms are expected to respond to alterations in their survival by
evolutionary changes in their life history traits. As agriculture and
aquaculture have become increasingly intensive in the past decades, there
has been growing interest in their evolutionary effects on the life
histories of agri- and aquacultural pests, parasites and pathogens. In
this study we used salmon lice (Lepeophtheirus salmonis) to explore how
modern farming might have affected life history evolution in parasites. We
infected salmon hosts with lice from either farmed or unfarmed locations,
and monitored life history traits of those parasites in laboratory
conditions. Our results show that compared to salmon lice from areas
unaffected by salmon farming, those from farmed areas produced more eggs
in their first clutch, and less eggs later on; they achieved higher
infestation intensities in early adulthood, but suffered higher adult
mortality. These results suggest that salmon lice on farms may have been
selected for increased investment in early reproduction, at the expense of
later fecundity and survival. This calls for further empirical studies of
the extent to which farming practices may alter the virulence of
agricultural parasites.