Corresponding Authors: Daniel J. Becker, daniel.becker88@gmail.com; Richard J. Hall, dr.richard.hall@gmail.com; Sonia Altizer, saltizer@uga.edu
Summary Author: Clarissa Keisling
Photo Credit: Richard Hall
Ecological and environmental research frequently reports on the negative anthropogenic effects on wildlife, with habitat loss and destruction as a major focus. However, human activities including agriculture, urbanization, and supplemental feeding can alternatively provide wildlife with abundant, predictable food resources, encouraging animals to alter foraging behaviors and resulting in larger, more aggregated populations. On one hand, this food provisioning helps feed the populations of animals that exploit these resources, such as bird-feeders, more so than their wild foraging counterparts that do not. On the other hand, these large animal gatherings around human food resources may facilitate disease transmission between wildlife, humans, and domestic animals, resulting in increasing spillover events of zoonotic pathogens from wild host reservoirs. This issue was addressed during the 2016 Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting where population ecologists, immunologists, epidemiologists and conservation biologists presented research and collaborated in discussion panels regarding supplemental feeding and wildlife disease. This review article summarizes the research presented at this meeting, and includes the work of CEID members Daniel Becker, Richard Hall, and Sonia Altizer. Together, their papers, along with several other researchers, integrate field, experimental, socioeconomic and modelling studies from a wide range of taxa and ecosystems, allowing for a greater understanding of host-parasite dynamics in relation to human resource subsidies. This summary article synthesizes this emerging research, highlighting important findings relevant for both public health and wildlife conservation.
Becker, Daniel J., et al. “Anthropogenic Resource Subsidies and Host–Parasite Dynamics in Wildlife.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, vol. 373, no. 1745, Dec. 2018, p. 20170086., doi:10.1098/rstb.2017.0086.