The past decade has seen an explosion in research exploring how ecological processes drive diseases in humans and wildlife. Shifting mosquito distributions with climate change, for example, has become common knowledge, spreading diseases like malaria and Zika fever to new frontiers. Ticks and Lyme disease are at the forefront of every camp counselor’s mind when leading pack trips into fragmented suburban forests. And now, for better or worse, the Covid-19 pandemic has given most ecologists and the general public the lived experience of intimate links between humans, the environment, and disease.

The rise of epidemiological theory and rigorous development of disease ecology research in terrestrial ecosystems have guided the emergence of marine disease ecology as a discipline in its own right. In fact, the first ever textbook devoted entirely to Marine Disease Ecology was just published by Oxford University Press in 2020. This new reference, in addition to a growing body of comparative research, has demonstrated that epidemiological processes differ widely in the ocean and on land. Marine systems’ openness and much greater parasite phylogenetic diversity leads to widely different trophic strategies and modes of pathogen transmission compared to land. This, combined with widely different human activities in oceans, such as fishing and aquaculture, have shown to uniquely influence the occurrence, distribution, and severity of marine diseases. Understanding diseases in marine ecosystems, and the intersectionality of theory from the fields of epidemiology and marine ecology, will allow marine disease ecology to mature into a more rigorous, hypothesis-driven discipline.

This course will be a training program in host-pathogen ecology that will bring together and train the future leaders in the rapidly emerging, multidisciplinary field of marine disease ecology. Students in the course will learn techniques to:

• survey host-pathogen interactions in the Friday Harbor region
• learn how to test Koch’s postulates (to prove that a pathogen causes disease)
• identify viral, bacterial, protozoan and metazoan infections
• learn and test major theories of disease ecology
• practice communicating about disease processes and risk to a variety of audiences
• learn genetic and genomic techniques for understanding disease processes
• practice building mathematical models of disease
• use these methods to address ecological questions about the distribution of pathogenic interactions and the mechanisms underlying them.

A primary goal of the interdisciplinary course is to provide advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral investigators with a broad understanding of host-pathogen interactions as well as the techniques used to study the ecology of marine animals in situ. We provide students with a unique opportunity to use state-of-the-art tools and technologies, do fieldwork in a highly biodiverse environment, join a network of active disease ecologists and collaborate on publishable research projects.

Following the successful course structure created during previous iterations of this course by ourselves, and prior to that by Drew Harvell, Carolyn Friedman, and Steven Roberts, the program will have at least two core modules, reflecting the strengths of the professors. These include: (1) conducting field surveys and experiments, (2) development and critical use of complimentary diagnostic tools. Each of these modules will be focused on learning a unique skillset while conducting original research on a novel question. Towards the end of the course, students will divide into smaller groups to focus on one of these projects, with the eventual “stretch” goal of publication. This latter goal requires interested students from the cohort to work with the faculty and remain engaged after the course has finished. Previous iterations of this structure have resulted in student publications in PLoS One, Diseases of Aquatic Organisms, and Integrative and Comparative Biology.

STUDENT SELECTION CRITERIA

The courses will be taught at the advanced undergraduate/graduate level, although postdoctoral investigators will be encouraged to attend as well. Student selection will be based on statements of intent and letters of recommendation from advisors or colleagues. Our goal is to enroll 12-15 students. To increase access to this course, we will provide $25,000 in student scholarships as part of an NSF EEID grant (Burge and Groner are both co-PIs on this grant).