Linking ecological variation to parasite transmission via host movement, behavior and social networks

社会互动、社会网络和个体行为极有可能影响传染病在人类和其他社会生物中的传播，但这些因素对疾病传播的影响程度仍然知之甚少。该项目利用易于操纵的宿主-寄生虫相互作用来阐明这些影响，因此具有显著的社会效益。最近埃博拉疫情的爆发和新的传染病的不断出现，突出了了解疾病传播如何受到行为和社会网络影响的重要性。与各机构和非政府组织建立的联系将使调查人员能够分享其结果，以便向各领域通报人类和野生动物健康情况。一系列的国内和国际研讨会将允许研究人员传播他们新颖的实验和建模方法。一个无代码的图形模拟平台正在开发中，它将允许各级学生研究个体行为、运动、种间相互作用和资源可用性如何影响疾病传播。这个平台将通过工作坊教授给没有电脑编程经验的个人，而这个平台的简单版本将被开发出来供中学课堂使用。博士后研究人员、研究生和本科生将在严格的领域和模型研究方面接受培训，并有明确的计划从服务不足的群体中招收学生。这项研究利用了美国和澳大利亚研究人员之间强有力的国际合作，并得到了美国国家科学基金会国际科学与工程办公室的共同支持。该项目利用一个经过充分研究的蜥蜴-蜱虫系统来研究生态和社会环境的时空变化如何与宿主行为类型的个体差异相互作用，从而影响个体宿主的运动、宿主的社会网络和寄生虫的传播。虽然这些概念上的联系是单独简单化的，但每个联系及其相互作用都呈现出复杂性，需要新的实验和建模方法。实地研究将使用栖息地调查来量化蜥蜴资源和避难所的位置，并将跟踪研究地点的所有蜥蜴，记录它们的运动、空间使用、社会互动和行为倾向。采样还将量化每只蜥蜴携带的蜱虫数量。这些研究将通过一项独特的实验来补充，该实验将基因不同的蜱虫添加到自由放养的蜥蜴中。该实验将量化蜥蜴宿主在寄生虫抗性方面的个体差异，具有不同行为倾向的个体作为实验释放寄生虫传播渠道的相对能力，以及寄生虫负荷增加对宿主行为、运动模式和社会互动的影响程度。实证结果将整合到贝叶斯统计模型和基于个体的模拟模型中，以检验行为机制在解释寄生虫负荷和传播中的作用。然后，这些模型将被用于研究诸如土地利用制度的转变或气候变化等环境变化将如何影响宿主-寄生虫动态。

Social interactions, social networks, and individual behavior are highly likely to influence infectious disease spread in humans and other social organisms, but the extent to which disease transmission is affected by these factors remains poorly known. This project capitalizes on a readily manipulated host-parasite interaction to elucidate these effects and therefore has significant societal benefits. The recent outbreak of Ebola and the continued emergence of new infectious diseases underscore the importance of understanding how disease transmission is affected by behavior and social networks. Established contacts with diverse agencies and non-governmental organizations will allow the investigators to share their results to inform the fields of both human and wildlife health. A series of national and international workshops will allow the investigators to disseminate their novel experimental and modeling methods. A code-free, graphical simulation platform is under development that will allow students at all levels to investigate how individual behavior, movement, interspecific interactions, and resource availability affect disease spread. This platform will be taught to individuals with no computer coding experience through workshops, and simpler versions of this platform will be developed for use in secondary school classes. Postdoctoral researchers, graduate students, and undergraduate students will be trained in rigorous field and modeling research, with clear plans to recruit students from under-served groups. The research leverages a strong international collaboration between US and Australian researchers, and is jointly supported by NSF's International Science and Engineering Office.The project takes advantage of a well-studied lizard-tick system to examine how spatial and temporal variation in the ecological and social environments interact with individual differences in host behavioral type to influence individual host movements, host social networks and parasite transmission. While these conceptual links are individually simplistic, each link and their interactions present complexities that require new experimental and modeling approaches. Field research will use habitat surveys to quantify the location of lizard resources and refuges and will track all lizards in a study site to document their movements, space-use, social interactions, and their behavioral tendencies. Sampling will also quantify the number of ticks carried by each lizard. These studies will be complemented by a unique experiment that adds genetically distinct ticks to free-ranging lizards. The experiment will quantify individual differences among lizard hosts in parasite resistance, the relative ability of individuals with different behavioral tendencies to serve as conduits for spreading experimentally-released parasites, and the extent to which increased parasite loads alter host behavior, movement patterns and social interactions. Empirical results will be integrated in Bayesian statistical models and individual-based simulation models to test the role of behavioral mechanisms in explaining parasite loads and transmission. The models will then be used to examine how environmental changes such as shifts in land use regimes or climate alterations will influence host-parasite dynamics.