2017 ESA Annual Meeting (August 6 -- 11)

COS 84-4 - The shape of the contact-density function matters for disease persistence: Evidence from an experiment-driven simulation model

Wednesday, August 9, 2017: 9:00 AM
D137, Oregon Convention Center
Benny Borremans1,2,3, Jonas Reijniers4,5, Nelika K Hughes4,6, Sophie Gryseels4,7, Stephanie Godfrey8, Niel Hens9,10, Rhodes Makundi11 and Herwig Leirs4, (1)Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, (2)Evolutionary Ecology Group, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, CA, Belgium, (3)Interuniversity Institute for Biostatistics and statistical Bioinformatics, Hasselt University, Diepenbeek, CA, Belgium, (4)Evolutionary Ecology Group, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium, (5)Department of Engineering Management, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium, (6)School of BioSciences, University of Melbourne, Australia, (7)Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, Tucson, (8)Department of Zoology, University of Otago, New Zealand, (9)Interuniversity Institute for Biostatistics and statistical Bioinformatics, Hasselt University, Diepenbeek, Belgium, (10)Centre for Health Economics Research & Modelling Infectious Diseases, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium, (11)Pest Management Center, Sokoine University of Agriculture, Morogoro, Tanzania, United Republic of
Background/Question/Methods

For many infectious diseases, contacts between individuals are a prerequisite for successful transmission of the pathogen, and the rate of contacts will determine the rate of transmission. Contacts between animals are influenced by many behavioral factors, several of which (e.g. territoriality, mate choice) are expected to change with population density. Such density-dependent changes in contacts can have important effects on pathogen transmission, invasion and persistence, but very little is known about how density can affect contacts or pathogen transmission, and most disease models assume transmission to be either independent of or linearly dependent on density without assessing the effects of this assumption. To address this empirical as well as conceptual knowledge gap, we combined a field experiment with a mathematical modelling study.

Results/Conclusions

By manipulating rodent population densities in field enclosures, we found that foraging contacts at a baiting station increased with density in a nonlinear, sigmoidal fashion, where contacts initially remained low, but then increased rapidly from a threshold density until reaching a plateau. Using these contact-density data we then simulated how different shapes of the contact-density function would affect the transmission of a directly-transmitted pathogen, and found that although prevalence and incidence patterns were relatively unaffected, pathogen invasion and persistence were highly dependent on the exact shape of the contact-density function. In accordance with previous conceptual studies, these results show that the contact-density function should be chosen with care when modelling disease transmission in fluctuating populations.