Using metabolic theory to describe temperature and thermal acclimation effects on parasitic infection

Predicting temperature effects on species interactions can be challenging, especially for parasitism where it is difficult to experimentally separate host and parasite thermal performance curves. Prior authors proposed a possible solution based on the metabolic theory of ecology (MTE), using MTE-based equations to describe the thermal mismatch between host and parasite performance curves and account for thermal acclimation responses. Here we use published infection data, supplemented with experiments measuring metabolic responses to temperature in each species, to show that this modeling framework can successfully describe thermal acclimation effects on two different stages of infection in a tadpole-trematode system. All thermal acclimation effects on host performance manifested as changes in one key model parameter (activation energy), with measurements of host respiration generating similar MTE parameter estimates and acclimation effects compared to measurements of the host’s ability to clear encysted parasites. This result suggests that metabolic parameter estimates for whole-body metabolism can sometimes be used to estimate temperature effects on host and parasite performance curves. However, we found different thermal patterns for measurements of host prevention of initial parasite encystment emphasizing potential challenges when applying MTE-based models to complex parasite-host systems with multiple distinct stages of infection.