Stochasticity and Infectious Disease Dynamics: Density and Weather Effects on a Fungal Insect Pathogen.

ABSTRACT: In deterministic models of epidemics, there is a host abundance threshold above which the introduction of a few infected individuals leads to a severe epidemic. Studies of weather-driven animal pathogens often assume that abundance thresholds will be overwhelmed by weather-driven stochasticity, but tests of this assumption are lacking. We collected observational and experimental data for a fungal pathogen, Entomophaga maimaiga, that infects the gypsy moth, Lymantria dispar. We used an advanced statistical-computing algorithm to fit mechanistic models to our data, such that different models made different assumptions about the effects of host density and weather on E. maimaiga epizootics (epidemics in animals). We then used Akaike information criterion analysis to choos

SUBMITTER: Kyle CH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10465172 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature