Fight not flight: parasites drive the bacterial evolution of resistance, not escape

Abstract

In the face of ubiquitous threats from parasites, hosts can evolve strategies to resist infection or to altogether avoid parasitism, for instance by avoiding behavior that could expose them to parasites or by dispersing away from local parasite threats. At the microbial scale, bacteria frequently encounter viral parasites, bacteriophages. While bacteria are known to utilize a number of strategies to resist infection by phages, and can have the capacity to avoid moving towards phage-infected cells, it is unknown whether bacteria can evolve dispersal to escape from phages. In order to answer this question, we combined experimental evolution and mathematical modeling. Experimental evolution of the bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens in environments with differing spatial distributions of the phage Phi2 revealed that the host bacteria evolved resistance depending on parasite distribution, but did not evolve dispersal to escape parasite infection. Simulations using parameterized mathematical models of bacterial growth and swimming motility showed that this is a general finding: while increased dispersal is adaptive in the absence of parasites, in the presence of parasites that fitness benefit disappears and resistance becomes adaptive, regardless of the spatial distribution of parasites. Together, these experiments suggest that parasites should rarely, if ever, drive the evolution of bacterial escape via dispersal.