Viral transmission and infection prevalence in a cannibalistic host-pathogen system.

Cannibalism, while prevalent in the natural world, is often viewed as detrimental to a cannibal's health, especially when they consume pathogen-infected conspecifics. The argument stems from the idea that cannibalizing infected individuals increases the chance of coming into contact with a pathogen and subsequently becoming infected. Using an insect pest, the fall armyworm (Spodoptera frugiperda), that readily cannibalizes at the larval stage and its lethal pathogen, we experimentally examined how cannibalism affects viral transmission at both an individual and population level.

Virulence-driven trade-offs in disease transmission: A meta-analysis.

The virulence-transmission trade-off hypothesis proposed more than 30 years ago is the cornerstone in the study of host-parasite co-evolution. This hypothesis rests on the premise that virulence is an unavoidable and increasing cost because the parasite uses host resources to replicate. This cost associated with replication ultimately results in a deceleration in transmission rate because increasing within-host replication increases host mortality.

Cannibalism and Infectious Disease: Friends or Foes?

Cannibalism occurs in a majority of both carnivorous and noncarnivorous animal taxa from invertebrates to mammals. Similarly, infectious parasites are ubiquitous in nature. Thus, interactions between cannibalism and disease occur regularly.

Landscape context outweighs local habitat quality in its effects on herbivore dispersal and distribution.

Past studies with spatially structured herbivore populations have emphasized the primacy of intrinsic factors (e.g., patch quality), patch geometry (e.