Anti-parasitic medication is common in humans, agricultural animals and wildlife. Medication has clear immediate benefits by reducing disease symptoms. However, medication may also have long-term negative consequences. It is well known that drug treatment can select for antibiotic resistance, which allows parasites to maintain growth in drug-treated individuals, but leaves their growth in untreated individuals unaltered. However, drug treatment could also select for aggressive parasites with higher intrinsic growth. These aggressive parasites would overcome drugs in treated individuals, but have extra high growth and cause extra severe disease in untreated individuals. Furthermore, the use of medication could make animal immunity superfluous and ultimately result in immune system decay. I will use monarch butterflies and their parasites to empirically test if animal medication selects for aggressive parasites and weakened immunity. My research over the last ten years has made this system ideally suited for this work. Monarch butterflies are commonly infected with a protozoan parasite, and use species of milkweed as their larval food plants. Milkweeds contain steroid chemicals called cardenolides. While monarchs are resistant to these chemicals, cardenolides are toxic to their parasites. Intriguingly, monarchs actively use cardenolides to protect against parasite infection: infected female butterflies preferentially lay eggs on high-cardenolide milkweed, which reduces parasites growth in their offspring. Moreover, monarchs living in some populations have access to medicinal milkweed, while monarchs in other populations do not. I will use experimental evolution to determine if medicinal milkweeds can select for parasites that cause more severe disease. I will also determine if natural populations where monarchs medicate harbour more aggressive parasites and monarchs with weaker immunity. This work will advance our fundamental understanding of host-parasite evolution, and have relevance to other systems in which animals use medication against parasite infection, including humans and agriculture, where medication is routinely used.

“Documenting Africans in Trans-Atlantic Slavery (DATAS)” (www.datasproject.org) develops an innovative method to explore African ethnonyms from the era of trans-Atlantic slavery, circa 1500-1867. Ethnonyms index African identities, places and historical events to reconstruct African culture that is linked to a history of slavery, colonialism and racism. The project centres on the need to understand the origins and trajectories of people of African descent who populated the trans-Atlantic world in the modern era. The development of a method for analysing demographic change and confronting social inequalities arising from racism constitutes a social innovation. The team’s methodology implements a research tool developed in Canada for handling ethnonyms that can be applied in a trans-Atlantic context from France and the United Kingdom to Brazil, the Caribbean and Africa. This innovation confronts methodological problems that researchers encounter in reconstructing the emergence of the African diaspora. A methodology for data justice is salient because ethnonym decision-making used in our digital platform, requires a reconceptualization of the classification systems concerning West Africans. This methodology depends on an open source relational database that addresses important decisions that researchers face in the field about how to develop best practices and a controlled vocabulary for four reasons. First, scholarly expertise on West Africans is scattered globally. Second, the slave trade was transnational, rarely limited to one country or population, and the transfer of Africans across borders reflects this global relationship between colonial and colonized. Third, DATAS makes available a vast amount of information of immense value to marginalized communities deprived of information on their own history. Fourth, the trans-Atlantic and trans-national nature of this project complements the aims of a platform predicated on global collaboration. The project treats ethnonyms as decision making tools as a method whose concepts require rethinking entrenched assumptions about demography, data justice and research transparency.