Populations are formed of their constituent interacting individuals, each with their own respective within-host biological processes. Infection not only spreads within the host organism but also spreads between individuals. We propose and study a nested multilevel model which links the within-host statuses of immunity and parasite density to population epidemiology under sub-lethal and lethal...
The deliberate release of Cyprinid herpes virus 3 (CyHV-3) to control invasive common carp (Cyprinus carpio) in the Murray-Darling Basin of south-eastern Australia has been dubbed `Carpageddon' and is highly controversial. Common carp now represent up to 90% of the biomass in invaded waterways and mortality rates of 70-80% have been observed during outbreaks of CyHV-3 in the northern...
A vaccine is a biological preparation, providing long-term protection of the host to a disease by miming the interactions between the pathogen and the immune response. For decades vaccines have been the most effective means to fight and eradicate infectious diseases, from human diseases to animals diseases, including poultry and porcine viruses. One of the most significant endemic swine...
The spectacular patterns of collective animal movement have been, and remain, a long standing and major interest in many branches of science, including biology, mathematics, physics and computational science. It is thought that the emergent patterns of coordinated motion are the consequence of individuals applying simple rules to adjust their velocity based on the relative locations and...
Transitive inference (TI) that uses known relationships to deduce unknown ones (using A > B and B > C to infer A > C given no direct interactions between A and C) to assess the opponent’s strength, or resource-holding potential (RHP), is widely reported in animals living in a group. This sounds counter-intuitive because the mechanism of TI seems to require social cognition and large memory...
Multiple selective pressures drive evolution of malaria parasite, and determine its phenotypic traits, like virulence, transmissibility, drug resistance, as well as its population structure in host communities. Immune regulation plays an important part in this process, both within-host and on population level. The key to parasite survival within host is its antigenic variation, whereby...
