An increase in temperature due to climate change may affect the geographic ranges of invasive parasites and alter their impact on native hosts. Our goal was to determine if the effects of infection by two species of invasive endoparasitic copepods on native blue mussel hosts ( Mytilus edulis ) change with increasing temperatures. We investigated this with a laboratory experiment using temperatures that represent annual mean an...

Rapid changes of marine ecosystems resulting from human activities and climate change, and the subsequent reported rise of infectious diseases in marine mammals, highlight the urgency for timely detection of unusual health events negatively affecting populations. Studies reporting pathological findings in the commonly stranded harbor porpoise ( Phocoena phocoena ) on North Atlantic coastlines are essential to describe new and...

Humans impact natural systems at an unprecedented rate. The North Sea is one of the regions in the world with the highest levels of anthropogenic activity. Here, the harbor porpoise ( Phocoena phocoena ) is an abundant species and is often regarded as an ecosystem sentinel. A post-mortem surveillance program was established in the Netherlands aimed at increasing knowledge of the effects of human activities on harbor porpoises....

Aim The spatial structure of a population can strongly influence the dynamics of infectious diseases, yet rarely is the underlying structure quantified. A case in point is plague, an infectious zoonotic disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis . Plague dynamics within the Central Asian desert plague focus have been extensively modelled in recent years, but always with strong uniformity assumptions about the distribution...

Ecology Letters (2009) 12: 1298–1305 Abstract The application of projection matrices in population biology to plant and animal populations has a parallel in infectious disease ecology when next‐generation matrices (NGMs) are used to characterize growth in numbers of infected hosts ( R 0 ). The NGM is appropriate for multi‐host pathogens, where each matrix element represents the number of cases of one type of host arising from...

We analyze an age‐, size‐ and sex‐structured model to investigate how the interplay between individual‐level energy budget dynamics and the feedback of population grazing on resources shapes the individual life history and the dynamics of ungulate populations, living in a predator‐free, seasonal resource environment. We formulate a dynamic energy budget model for individual energetics, which accounts for energy requirements fo...