Achievement

Trainee Marty Kardos is conducting research to explore connections among genes, parasites, and fitness in wild populations of bighorn sheep. Identifying connections among genes, phenotype, and fitness is crucial in evolutionary biology. A trait that can strongly affect fitness is parasite susceptibility. There is much evidence that variability at specific immune genes is important to parasite defense in captive populations and humans, but the genetic mechanisms of parasite resistance and their importance to fitness in the wild remain elusive. Kardos is using long-term fitness, genetic, and parasite data from four wild bighorn sheep populations to determine whether, and how, specific immune genes are related to parasite resistance; the effects of individual genes on parasite resistance; and whether genes that affect parasite resistance are important to fitness. Kardos’s study is testing a phenotypic pathway of parasite-mediated selection, an approach seldom accomplished in the wild.