ERC Starting Grant · 2025
The effects of sexual selection on epidemic outcomes
Sexual selection has two intuitive but overlooked implications for epidemics. First, infectious diseases spread when individuals contact each other. Reproduction is a major driver of contact: mate preferences should affect who contacts whom, and thus parasite transmission opportunity. Sexual selection research shows that choosers prefer mates with high quality ornaments, which generally indicate parasite resistance, but the predicted epidemiological consequence of such contact with more resistant individuals – that transmission slows – is untested. Second, choosers selecting mates that resist parasite infection may benefit indirectly as this increases the parasite resistance of their…
From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.