Wells Konstans, Hamede Rodrigo K, Kerlin Douglas H, Storfer Andrew, Hohenlohe Paul A, Jones Menna E, McCallum Hamish I
Environmental Futures Research Institute, Griffith University, Brisbane, QLD, 4111, Australia.
School of Biological Sciences, University of Tasmania, Private Bag 55, Hobart, Tas, 7001, Australia.
Ecol Lett. 2017 Jun;20(6):770-778. doi: 10.1111/ele.12776. Epub 2017 May 10.
Emerging infectious diseases rarely affect all members of a population equally and determining how individuals' susceptibility to infection is related to other components of their fitness is critical to understanding disease impacts at a population level and for predicting evolutionary trajectories. We introduce a novel state-space model framework to investigate survival and fecundity of Tasmanian devils (Sarcophilus harrisii) affected by a transmissible cancer, devil facial tumour disease. We show that those devils that become host to tumours have otherwise greater fitness, with higher survival and fecundity rates prior to disease-induced death than non-host individuals that do not become infected, although high tumour loads lead to high mortality. Our finding that individuals with the greatest reproductive value are those most affected by the cancer demonstrates the need to quantify both survival and fecundity in context of disease progression for understanding the impact of disease on wildlife populations.
新发传染病很少会平等地影响一个种群的所有成员，确定个体对感染的易感性如何与其适应性的其他组成部分相关，对于理解疾病在种群水平上的影响以及预测进化轨迹至关重要。我们引入了一种新颖的状态空间模型框架，以研究受一种可传播癌症——袋獾面部肿瘤病影响的袋獾（袋獾属）的生存和繁殖力。我们发现，那些成为肿瘤宿主的袋獾在其他方面具有更高的适应性，在疾病导致死亡之前，其生存率和繁殖率高于未被感染的非宿主个体，尽管高肿瘤负荷会导致高死亡率。我们的研究结果表明，具有最大繁殖价值的个体受癌症影响最大，这表明需要在疾病进展的背景下对生存和繁殖力进行量化，以了解疾病对野生动物种群的影响。
