Bats are important reservoirs for emerging infectious diseases, yet the mechanisms that allow highly virulent pathogens to persist within bat populations remain obscure. In Latin America, vampirebat-transmitted rabies virus represents a key example of how such uncertainty can impede efforts to prevent cross-species transmission. Despite decades of agricultural and human health losses, control efforts have had limited success. To establish persistence mechanisms of vampire-bat-transmitted rabies virus in Latin America, we use data from a spatially replicated, longitudinal field study of vampire bats in Peru to parameterize a series of mechanistic transmission models. We find that single-colony persistence cannot occur. Instead, dispersal of bats between colonies, combined with a high frequency of immunizing nonlethal infections, is necessary to maintain rabies virus at levels consistent with field observations. Simulations show that the strong spatial component to transmission dynamics could explain the failure of bat culls to eliminate rabies and suggests that geographic coordination of control efforts might reduce transmission to humans and domestic animals. These findings offer spatial dynamics as a mechanism for rabies persistence in bats that might be important for the understanding and control of other bat-borne pathogens.Desmodus rotundus | zoonotic disease | host-pathogen dynamics | spatial processes | wildlife culling
Mathematical models are ubiquitous in the study of the transmission dynamics of infectious diseases, In particular, the classic 'susceptibleinfectious-recovered' (SIR) paradigm provides a modeling framework that can be adapted to describe the core transmission dynamics of a range of human and wildlife diseases. These models provide an important tool for uncovering the mechanisms generating observed disease dynamics, evaluating potential control strategies, and predicting future outbreaks. With ongoing advances in computational tools as well as access to disease incidence data, the use of such models continues to increase. Here, we provide a basic introduction to disease modeling that is primarily intended for individuals who are new to developing SIR-type models. In particular, we highlight several common issues encountered when structuring and analyzing these models.
Coral resilience is important for withstanding ecological disturbances as well as anthropogenic changes to the environment. However, the last several decades have demonstrated a decline in resilience that has often resulted in phase shifts to a degraded coraldepleted state with high levels of algal abundance. A major defining issue in current research is to identify when and how it is possible to reverse these phase shifts allowing for the ecosystem to escape coral depletion and maintain coral-based ecosystem services. We extend an analytic model to focus on the effects of overharvesting of herbivorous reef fish in the Caribbean by explicitly including grazer dynamics which introduces feedbacks between habitat and grazer abundance posing constraints on management options excluded in previous studies. This allows us to develop ecosystembased management recommendations for two distinct scenarios of coral reef recovery: The first follows significant habitat damage in response to a large disturbance and the second maintains reef structure but has suffered from events such as coral bleaching. We identify critical fishing effort levels to allow for coral recovery and demonstrate that regions exhibiting severe damage to reef structure have little resilience implying that fishing reductions should be coupled with other restoration methods. Regions that are coraldepleted but maintain reef structure allow for recovery given sufficiently small levels of fishing mortality. However, we demonstrate the difference in recovery time in response to varying levels of control efforts on fishing.
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