Meeting Abstract
Observations that the outcome of infection for individual hosts depends on ecological factors such as age, sex, resource availability, and environmental stressors form the foundation of ecological immunology. However, it remains challenging to scale individual-level patterns, and their underlying mechanisms, up to the level of populations or ecological communities. Despite this challenge, scaling eco-immunology up to the population and community level could greatly enhance our understanding of the ecological dynamics of disease, feedbacks among parasitism and other ecological interactions, and the eco-epidemiological consequences of anthropogenic impacts and disease control efforts. Here we use Individual Based Models (IBMs) based on general metabolic theory [Dynamic Energy Budget (DEB)] theory to scale from individual infection dynamics (time-explicit life-history trajectories of growth, reproduction, parasite production, and death) to epidemiological dynamics using the major human parasite, Schistosoma mansoni, and its intermediate host snail, Biomphalaria glabrata. At the individual level, low resource supply and/or intense resource competition greatly reduces parasite production by infected snails. At the population level, our DEB-IBM predicts brief, but intense periods of parasite production, and therefore human risk, when resources become abundant, i.e., early in seasonal environments, following pulses of resource enrichment, or after attempts at snail elimination. These more nuanced, individually-based epidemiological predictions can identify specific conditions, times of the year, and periods of elevated risk to better track ecological feedbacks of disease management and improve the prevention of human risk for schistosome infection.
