Meeting Abstract
Recent theory suggests that animals that migrate to breed at higher latitudes may benefit from reduced pressure from natural enemies, including pathogens (“migratory escape”). The distribution and activity period of arthropod disease vectors in temperate regions is expected to increase under climate change, which could lead to a longer pathogen transmission window and reduce the potential for migratory escape. However, climate change could have the opposite effect of reducing transmission if shifting host migratory strategy reduces overlap with vectors in space and time. Here we develop a simple model to explore the influence of climate change on vector-borne disease dynamics in a migratory host. We investigate support for two mechanisms by which migrants might experience reduced disease risk under climate change: (i) poleward shifts in host breeding latitudes that increase migration distance cause infected hosts to experience higher migratory mortality (“migratory culling”) and (ii) vectors respond more rapidly to changing environmental conditions in the breeding range than migrants, causing peak susceptible host density and peak vector emergence to diverge (“migratory mismatch”). This model provides a useful framework for understanding how migratory populations will respond to environmental change and emerging disease threats.
