Data from: Disease resistance is more costly at younger ages: An explanation for the maintenance of juvenile susceptibility

High juvenile susceptibility drives infectious disease epidemics across
kingdoms, yet the evolutionary mechanisms that maintain this
susceptibility are unclear. We tested the hypothesis that juvenile
susceptibility is maintained by high costs of juvenile resistance by
quantifying the genetic correlation between host fitness and age-specific
innate resistance to a fungal pathogen in a wild plant. We found
significant fitness costs associated with disease resistance at juvenile
but not at adult host stages, and show that the magnitude of these
juvenile resistance costs are sufficient to prevent the spread of juvenile
resistance in models. Our results provide the first direct evidence that
costs of resistance decrease with host age, and provide an explanation for
the maintenance of epidemiologically important juvenile susceptibility in
natural populations.