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Keeping the herds healthy and alert: implications of predator control for infectious disease
Open accessAbstract
Predator control programmes are generally implemented in an attempt to increase prey population sizes. However, predator removal could prove harmful to prey populations that are regulated primarily by parasitic infections rather than by predation. We develop models for microparasitic and macroparasitic infection that specify the conditions where predator removal will (a) increase the incidence of parasitic infection, (b) reduce the number of healthy individuals in the prey population and (c) decrease the overall size of the prey population. In general, predator removal is more likely to be harmful when the parasite is highly virulent, macroparasites are highly aggregated in their prey, hosts are long‐lived and the predators select infected prey.
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Citations
Cited by
Status and Ecological Effects of the World’s Largest Carnivores
Ripple, W. J., Estes, J. A., Beschta, R. L., Wilmers, C. C., Ritchie, E. G., Hebblewhite, M., Berger, J., Elmhagen, B., Letnic, M., Nelson, M. P., et al. (2014) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1241484 · Cited by 3,667
Is a healthy ecosystem one that is rich in parasites?
Hudson, P. J., Dobson, A. P., & Lafferty, K. D. (2006) · Trends in Ecology & Evolution · doi:10.1016/j.tree.2006.04.007 · Cited by 989
Self-citationEffects of Host Diversity on Infectious Disease
Ostfeld, R. S., & Keesing, F. (2012) · Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics · doi:10.1146/annurev-ecolsys-102710-145022 · Cited by 528
Does biodiversity protect humans against infectious disease?
Wood, C. L., Lafferty, K. D., DeLeo, G., Young, H. S., Hudson, P. J., & Kuris, A. M. (2014) · Ecology · doi:10.1890/13-1041.1 · Cited by 268
Self-citationNoninvasive Assessment of Gastrointestinal Parasite Infections in Free-Ranging Primates
Gillespie, T. R. (2006) · International Journal of Primatology · doi:10.1007/s10764-006-9064-x · Cited by 266
Metadata
- Authors
- Packer, C., Holt, R. D., Hudson, P. J., Lafferty, K. D., & Dobson, A. P.
- Venue
- Ecology Letters
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2003-07-28
- Volume
- 6
- Issue
- 9
- Pages
- 797-802
- ISSN
- 1461-023X (ISSN-L)
- 1461-0248
- OpenAlex
- W2152669850
- Cited by
- 431
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 11.21
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
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- Packer, C., Holt, R. D., Hudson, P. J., Lafferty, K. D., & Dobson, A. P. (2003). Keeping the herds healthy and alert: implications of predator control for infectious disease. Ecology Letters. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1461-0248.2003.00500.x
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
