Print PageMathematics has long been an important tool for understanding and controlling the spread of infectious diseases in human and wildlife populations. I will first present an overview of contact network epidemiology, a relatively new approach that applies bond percolation on random graphs to model the spread of infectious disease through heterogeneous populations. Using behavioral data collected by the Serengeti Lion Project, I will then illustrate how these methods can be used to investigate the epidemiological structure of a wildlife population.
Results/Conclusions
Contact network epidemiology offers an intuitive and versatile modeling framework for investigating the impacts of individual-level variation in behavior and movement patterns on infectious disease dynamics. In the case of Serengeti Lions, we have found that, despite their extreme territoriality, prides have sufficiently frequent inter-pride encounters to sustain epidemics of even moderately transmissible diseases, and, consequently, nomadic lions may play relatively minor roles in disease transmission. However, the spatiotemporal dynamics of a devastating 1994 epidemic of Canine Distemper Virus suggest that this particular outbreak was not propagated by lion-to-lion transmission alone, but rather fueled by repeated introductions from other carnivore species in the ecosystem.
