Chestnut Blight

The American Chestnut was the dominant canopy tree in the hardwood forests of the eastern US until it was decimated by a pathogenic fungus, Cryphonectria parasitica (chestnut blight), during the first half of this century. The chestnut blight fungus is often infected by a parasite of its own, a double-stranded (ds) RNA molecule, which debilitates the pathogen and allows the tree to recover.

I have been working in collaboration with Andrew Jarosz and Rich Lenski (Michigan State University). We have been working on a models of host pathogen systems with three trophic levels, making specific reference to the chestnut blight system. We have developed a general model of these systems that focuses on the consequences of different modes of disease transmission on evolution at all three trophic levels. This model has implications for long-term prospects of biological control using hyperparasites with different modes of transmission, and offers some important recommendations for the chestnut blight system.

The chestnut project also has an empirical component. Henry Wilbur and I have established long term plots at Mountain Lake Biological Station. In the future, we will combine these data with those from similar studies on recovering populations in Michigan to identify population and habitat differences that may explain the dramatically different outcome of the disease epidemic in these two regions.

Publications - More at Dave McCauley's Page

• Stilwell, K.L, H.M. Wilbur, C.R. Werth and D.R. Taylor. 2002. Heterozygote advantage in the American Chestnut, Castanea dentata (Fagaceae). American Journal of Botany
• Taylor, D.R. 2001. Ecology and evolution of reduced virulence in the chestnut-blight host pathogen system. In. Virulence Management. U. Dieckman, M. Sabelis, M. Nowak (eds).
• Taylor, D.R., A.M. Jarosz, R.E. Lenski and D. Fulbright. 1998. Acquisition of hypovirulence in host-pathogen systems with three trophic levels. American Naturalist 151: 343-355.

Department of Biology, PO Box 400328 University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4328
Email: drt3b@virginia.edu  Phone:(434)982-5217