Meeting Abstract
Global changes have resulted in drastic increases in the emergence of infectious diseases worldwide. The consequences of these emerging events impact conservation efforts and human health, yet most research into the impacts of an emerging disease are limited to the disease in question. These diseases emerge into hosts that are concurrently infected with numerous pathogens, as is the norm in free-ranging animals, but our understanding of the response of the disease community as a whole to an emerging disease is limited. A framework developed to understand the effects of disturbances on functional trait diversity in multispecies communities (Boersma et al 2014) may offer a new approach. We investigated how an invading disease (Bovine Tuberculosis) affects the functional and taxonomic diversity of a community of pathogens in African Buffalo (Syncerus caffer), using data from a longitudinal study where animals were captured twice a year from 2008-2012. We first asked how taxonomic diversity of pathogens changed in 47 buffalo that acquired BTB during the course of the study. We than asked if these changes were different than the changes in 47 uninfected buffalo randomly selected from the population. We then used a trait-based approach to ask whether the community of pathogens changed in functional ways after BTB infection using both the 47 buffalo which acquired BTB and 47 uninfected buffalo. Lastly we evaluated whether host traits (age, condition, immunity) correlated to the degree to which the buffalo disease and trait community changed after infection with BTB and compared it to the control hosts (uninfected with BTB).
