Alexis Heckley

• McGill University

Forest loss can affect host–parasite dynamics, posing risks to wildlife and human health. Most work has investigated how host traits moderate associations between forest loss and prevalence, but the role that parasite traits play is less understood. We synthesized parasite prevalence and parasite trait data from publicly available databases represe...

Dispersal can affect individual‐level fitness and population‐level ecological and evolutionary processes. Factors that affect dispersal could therefore have important eco‐evolutionary implications. Here, we investigated the extent to which an inflammation and tissue repair response—peritoneal fibrosis—which is known to restrict movement, could infl...

Behavioural avoidance of parasites in the environment generates what is known as the ‘landscape of disgust’ (analogous to the predator-induced ‘landscape of fear’). Despite the potential for improving our inference of host–parasite dynamics, three limitations of the landscape of disgust restrict the insight that is gained from current research: (i)...

Sleep is associated with many costs, but is also important to survival, with a lack of sleep impairing cognitive function and increasing mortality. Sleeping in groups could alleviate sleep‐associated costs, or could introduce new costs if social sleeping disrupts sleep. Working with the Jamaican fruit bat ( Artibeus jamaicensis) , we aimed to: (1)...

Behavioural plasticity allows organisms to respond to environmental challenges on short time scales. But what are the ecological and evolutionary processes that underlie behavioural plasticity? The answer to this question is complex and requires experimental dissection of the physiological, neural and molecular mechanisms contributing to behavioura...

Habitat degradation can increase zoonotic disease risks by altering infection dynamics in wildlife and increasing wildlife–human interactions. Bats are an important taxonomic group to consider these effects, because they harbour many relevant zoonotic viruses and have species‐ and context‐dependent responses to degradation that could affect zoonoti...

1. Individual animals can attempt to prevent or mitigate parasite risks by altering their behaviour or space use. Behavioural change in response to the presence of parasites in the environment generates what is known as the “landscape of disgust” (analogous to the predator-induced “landscape of fear”). Using a spatial description of cues that indic...

Tropical regions are experiencing rapid rates of forest fragmentation, which can have several effects on wildlife, including altered parasite dynamics. Bats are a useful host group to consider the effects of fragmentation, because they are abundant in the tropics, serve important ecological roles, and harbor many parasites. Nevertheless, research o...

Examples of parallel evolution have been crucial for our understanding of adaptation via natural selection. However, strong parallelism is not always observed even in seemingly similar environments where natural selection is expected to favour similar phenotypes. Leveraging this variation in parallelism within well-researched study systems can prov...

A number of examples exist of trade-offs between mating success and survival; that is, success in one fitness component comes at the cost of success in the other fitness component. However, these expected trade-offs are – perhaps even more commonly – not observed. One explanation for this apparent paradox of missing trade-offs could be that the oth...