The experiment investigates the survival of Caenorhabditis elegans host populations when exposed to a bacterial parasite, Serratia marcescens. Exposed host populations were either large (500 individuals) or small (25 or 50 individuals) and were either susceptible or resistant to the disease. Populations of C. elegans were evolved against either heat-killed or live bacteria. After 13 generations of host evolution, we exposed the worms again to the bacteria to determine whether the worms lost, gained, or maintained resistance to the parasite. In this dataset, we counted the number of worms still living after 48 hours post-infection. A proportion of dead hosts was calculated based on the number of worms still alive after 48 hours divided by the number initially infected.

The dataset was collected in the laboratory of Levi Morran at Emory University. Live worms from each Petri dish replicate were counted on dissecting microscopes. The data was processed by JMP Pro 13.0 (SAS) to perform a series of generalized linear models for statistical analysis. The resulting manuscript was accepted for publication in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology.

The Readme file contains information on each of the variables in the datasets. The EF3 tab refers to the initially resistant worm populations, whereas the CF3 tab refers to the susceptible worm populations. More information on these populations can be found in White et al. 2021 Journal of Evolutionary Biology and Morran et al. 2011 Science.