Heritability of host traits in response to parasites in marine and coastal communities

We did a search on ISI’s Web-of-Science (December 31 2024) using the following search terms: “heritab*” and “disease or parasit* or pathogen* or infectio*” and “marine or estuarine or coastal.” We also gathered articles cited in several review papers. We kept papers that estimated heritability of a species’ fitness-related trait when exposed to a parasite population. Estimates were made in the field or in a more manipulated environment (sea pen, production pond, mesocosm, laboratory tanks). We included heritability of fitness-related traits: survivorship (days to death, binomial survival curve, etc..), a growth (body length or weight), and parasite load (density, presence/absence). Estimates were generated using a traditional structured breeding strategy (half-sibs, full-sibs), unstructured breeding strategy (i.e., Pedigree “animal” models) and Genomic relationship matrix (or GRM "animal" models; sensu (Richards et al. 2023). The methods used were largely via structure breeding of families, until 2000 when microsatellite- and SNP-based approaches were being incorporated (Figure 1A). We found 130 estimates of heritability in host response traits (survivorship, growth and parasite load) to micro- and macro-parasites for 24 species of hosts. We could find no estimate of heritability within any parasite, nor in any seaweed nor vascular plant; these are clear gaps in the literature.