Beyond single host, single parasite interactions: quantifying competence for complete multi-host, multi-parasite communities

Understanding parasite transmission in communities requires knowledge of each species’ capacity to support transmission. This property, “competence”, is a critical currency for modeling transmission under community change and for testing diversity-disease theory. Despite the central role of competence in disease ecology, we lack a clear understanding of the factors that generate competence and drive its variation.
We developed novel conceptual and quantitative approaches to systematically quantify competence for a multi-host, multi-parasite community. We applied our framework to an extensive dataset: five amphibian host species exposed to four parasitic trematode species across five ecologically realistic exposure doses. Together, this experimental design captured twenty host-parasite interactions while integrating important information on variation in parasite exposure. Using experimental infection assays, we measured multiple components of the infection process and combined them to pr...