The macroecology of viral coinfection

Coinfection is common in wild animals, and can have profound consequences for disease outcomes and transmission. However, most research on coinfection is based on laboratory experiments or well-studied wildlife systems. Here, we use the testing data from the PREDICT project – the largest standardized wildlife disease surveillance project ever conducted – to describe patterns of viral coinfection, and evaluate their association with host and virus factors. We find that coinfection is rare because viral infections are rare, but coinfection is more common than expected by random chance – especially among coronaviruses, paramyxoviruses, and influenza A virus. We further find that coinfection risk changes over the host lifespan, but bats and rodents exhibit divergent responses to aging. Finally, we find that cave-roosting bats do not have a significantly higher rate of coinfection, but wild animals in captivity do – highlighting potential risks to wildlife and human health from the wildlife trade. Our results suggest that macroecological patterns of coinfection are driven by a mix of macroevolutionary and host-level variation in immunity, virus-virus interactions, and human influence, and point to coinfection as a potentially important (and frequently, undetected) driver of viral dynamics in nature.