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Reproduction And Parasite-Mediated Selection, Meredith A. Krause

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Sexual reproduction generates genetic diversity that can help hosts respond to selection by parasites, and in this thesis, I test three predictions on how reproduction impacts predictions by the parasite theory of sex and the Red Queen hypothesis. In Chapter one, using a meta-analysis, I found that asexuals (lower genetic diversity) have more parasites than sexuals (higher genetic diversity), but this difference can be heavily mediated by the mode and origin of asexuality. Further, hybridization but not polyploidy can blunt predicted differences in parasite loads among sexual and asexual hosts. In Chapter two, I flip the perspective of Red Queen …