Eco-epidemiological interactions with predator interference and infection.

Eco-epidemiological interactions with predator interference and infection. Theor Popul Biol. 2019 Aug 22;: Authors: Bulai IM, Hilker FM Abstract Predator interference is a form of competition between predator individuals over access to their prey. There is broad empirical evidence for interference to exist in different strengths in various types of ecological communities. At the same time, parasites are increasingly recognized to alter food web structure and dynamics. In order to investigate the eco-epidemiological interplay between interference and infection, we develop and analyze mathematical models of a predator-prey system, where the predators are subject to both interference and infectious disease. In the absence of infection, equilibrium predator density is known to show a non-monotonic response to interference by first increasing and then decreasing with increasing interference levels. We show that predator infection can change this pattern into a monotonically decreasing predator response to interference, provided the transmissibility is large enough and the pathogenicity is moderate such that the impact of disease on host population density prevails over interference effects. This holds for both types of disease transmission studied here, density-dependent and frequency-dependent. For density-dependent transmission, we find that intermediate values of interference can facilitate disease persistence, whereas the disease woul...
Source: Theoretical Population Biology - Category: Biology Authors: Tags: Theor Popul Biol Source Type: research