Who wags the tail of the heterogenity distribution?

The statistical description of heterogeneity, using the negative binomial has been important in understanding parasite-host stability and will play a role in identifying how parasites and pathogens persist in populations. Further insights have arisen by studying what happens to different cohorts of individuals and how these dynamics are embedded within these distributions while experiments and longitudinal studies have shown some of the drivers that wag the tail of the distribution. Now is the time to think about this harder and examine why this heterogenity is important for ecological issues like persistence and emerging disease issues