IGN 16

Heterogeneity in Animal Disease Ecology: Then and Now

Disease among animals is a major concern in wildlife conservation biology, creates risk for producers of livestock and poultry, and affects public health through zoonotic disease emergence. Transmission and spread of diseases among wildlife and between species can be complicated by spatial, temporal and individual heterogeneities. Naturally, heterogeneity becomes a major focus when variation induces disease spread that would not arise under average conditions. Textbook examples include transmission or contact heterogeneity that create insuppressible epidemics. The speakers in this session will describe how accounting for heterogeneity has changed their understanding of a particular animal disease system. To emphasize the transformations within disease research, to promote retrospection at ESAs Centennial meeting, and to experiment with the Ignite ESA format, the session also features paired “Then” & “Now” presentations from five different research groups. Lab principles or postdoctoral investigators will provide a glimpse of the early paradigms concerning a particular host and pathogen. More junior scientists from each lab will follow-up with current research, emphasizing new results on heterogeneity in the disease system previously described. The speaker pairs will aim to demonstrate how wildlife disease ecology has eclipsed the foundational studies that typically controlled, or ignored, heterogeneity? The participating research groups will cover a wide range of disease systems and methodologies. The animals and diseases addressed include pneumonia in Bighorn sheep, viral zoonoses among bats, fungal parasites on ants, and desert tortoise respiratory tract infections. Modeling plays a vital role in understanding heterogeneity and also features strongly in the session.