Summary

Original source:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/02/050205073600.htm

Details

• What provokes sudden, dramatic outbreaks of diseases, large fluctuations in parasite abundance, and rapid termination of epidemics?
• The search for drivers of these complex behaviors has become more urgent as epidemics in wildlife populations continue to arise.
• Recently ecologists have realized that other species may strongly shape disease dynamics.
• Predators are particularly interesting because they often prefer to attack parasitized hosts.
• To answer this question, Spencer R. Hall, Meghan A. Duffy, and Carla E. Cáceres studied a simple model which shows how predators that strongly prefer parasitized hosts can introduce "Allee effects" for parasites at lower productivity and sudden but unavoidable extinction of parasites at higher productivity.
• In the former case, parasites have difficulty invading a host population, while in the latter case, parasites cannot persist with their hosts, even if they can invade.
• When predators less strongly prefer parasitized hosts, these dramatic behaviors diminish, but predators can still trigger large fluctuations of parasite abundance at higher productivity.
• Surprisingly, when predators show no preference for or even avoid parasitized hosts, interactions between the two enemies can drive both host and parasite unavoidably extinct.
• These findings stress the importance of the biological and ecosystem background in which hosts and parasites interact.

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