Human activities that provide food subsidies to wildlife can have profound impacts on animal populations and their exposure to pathogens. Theory and manipulative experiments have typically investigated the ecological consequences of resource subsidies provided at a constant rate for host-pathogen dynamics. However, when wildlife is fed intentionally (e.g. for recreation or conservation), the amount and frequency of food provided may be influenced by perceptions of the natural system, including weather, abundance of the focal fed species, and visible signs of disease. Here I develop simple theory for coupling the dynamics of a wildlife host-pathogen system with food provisioning intensity, contrasting scenarios where the rate of food provisioning is independent of, or depends on, components of the natural system.
Results/Conclusions
Unlike constant food provisioning, which tends to result in stable host population sizes and endemic infection, coupling provisioning intensity to ecological factors can result in more complex emergent dynamics, including seasonally punctuated epidemics and sustained cycles of host, pathogen and provisioning intensity. Fluctuations in host abundance and parasite prevalence are further exacerbated by seasonal variation in provisioning intensity, and imperfect or delayed responses of the natural system to changes in the food provisioning rate (and vice versa). Accounting for this coupling of human activity to ecological dynamics could inform development of best practice guidelines for wildlife feeding that minimize its unintended negative consequences.