Dynamics of a multihost pathogen in a carnivore community

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Abstract
1 We provide the first theoretical analysis of multihost disease dynamics to incorporate social behaviour and contrasting rates of within‐ and between‐group disease transmission. 2 A stochastic susceptible–infected–recovered (SIR) model of disease transmission involving one to three sympatric species was built to mimic the 1994 Serengeti canine distemper virus outbreak, which infected a variety of carnivores with widely ranging social structures. The model successfully mimicked the erratic and discontinuous spatial pattern of lion deaths observed in the Serengeti lions under a reasonable range of parameter values, but only when one to two other species repeatedly transmitted the virus to the lion population. 3 The outputs from our model suggest several principles that will apply to most directly transmitted multihost pathogens: (i) differences in social structure can significantly influence the size, velocity and spatial pattern of a multihost epidemic; and (ii) social structures that permit higher intraspecific neighbour‐to‐neighbour transmission are the most likely to transmit disease to other species; whereas (iii) species with low neighbour‐to‐neighbour intraspecific transmission suffer the greatest costs from interspecific transmission.

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