A quantitative narrative on movement, disease and patch exploitation in nesting agent groups

Wayne M. Getz; Richard Salter; Krti Tallam

In standard SIR epidemic models, the virulence of a pathogen is assumed to be 284 captured by the size of the disease-induced mortality rate parameter [14] . In our model 285 this parameter is µ I ( Table 2) . We investigated the effects of increasing the value of this 286 virulence parameter in the context of a pathogen transmission rate of β = 0.05 (Table 2 ) 287 that leads to outbreaks that generally persist over our 2000 time step interval (cf. Lotka-Volterra-type population process iterated at a "slow" daily time scale. This study 340 found inter-alia that increasing predator efficiency by either increasing their perceptual 341 range or decreasing the number of prey refugia resulted in a coexistence region-an 342 equilibrium around which the prey and predatory populations oscillated-decreased for 343 both prey and predator, thereby increasing the risk of extinction. As in our model, the 344 second study included the interaction of both competition and predation. The