Zooplankton are critical members of aquatic food webs. They also provide powerful model systems for eco-evolutionary dynamics and the community ecology of disease. Above, Ceriodaphnia (small) and Daphnia (large) compete and interfere with transmission of each other's parasites.
Sampling local plankton communities in Whitehall Forest, UGA. A recently-discovered group of microsporidian parasites reaches high infection prevalence in Daphnia host populations in springtime, with unclear transmission dynamics or ecological consequences.
Guinea worm parasites (Dracunculus medinensis) alternate between infecting copepods (above) and people. The disease is nearly eradicated but persists in several countries in Africa, where we study population and community dynamics of the copepod intermediate hosts.
Mesocosm experiments can test the impacts of temperature, nutrients, turbidity, host genetic backgrounds, and species interactions (e.g., competition, predation, etc.) on disease dynamics at the community scale over multiple host generations.
