Emerging infectious diseases have caused enormous population declines and species extinctions. Understanding the role of different species in both transmission and impacts of disease remains a key challenge in disease ecology. The emergence of several multi-host fungal pathogens in the past few decades, including chytridiomycosis in frogs and salamanders and white nose syndrome in bats, has made this challenge especially important for this pathogen type with its unique biological traits. We used integral projection models to describe the relatively slow pathogen dynamics of white-nose syndrome on individual bat hosts and the transmission among species and the environmental reservoir.
Results/Conclusions
We find that species play highly disparate roles in transmission due to differences in within-host pathogen dynamics, and these differences have cascading impacts on population impacts of disease. As a result, sites with different community compositions had disparate disease dynamics and differential impacts. The integration of models and rich data streams from multiple years and sites provided unique insight into the underlying ecology of this devastating disease.