The Effect of Covert and Overt Infections on Disease Dynamics in Honey-Bee Colonies.

Viral diseases of honey bees are important economically and ecologically and have been widely modelled. The models reflect the fact that, in contrast to the typical case for vertebrates, invertebrates cannot acquire immunity to a viral disease, so they are of SIS or (more often) SI type. Very often, these diseases may be transmitted vertically as well as horizontally, by vectors as well as directly, and through the environment, although models do not generally reflect all these transmission mechanisms.

How ants use quorum sensing to estimate the average quality of a fluctuating resource.

We show that one of the advantages of quorum-based decision-making is an ability to estimate the average value of a resource that fluctuates in quality. By using a quorum threshold, namely the number of ants within a new nest site, to determine their choice, the ants are in effect voting with their feet. Our results show that such quorum sensing is compatible with homogenization theory such that the average value of a new nest site is determined by ants accumulating within it when the nest site is of high quality and leaving when it is poor.

Parasite species richness and its effect on persistence in food webs.

Parasitic species are likely to have a significant effect on the stability of ecosystems. However, little is known of the nature of this effect, with debate over whether it is positive or negative. In previous work it was observed that a mixture of interaction types increases the local stability of a network.

Network dynamics contribute to structure: nestedness in mutualistic networks.

Both ecological and evolutionary timescales are of importance when considering an ecological system; population dynamics affect the evolution of species traits, and vice versa. Recently, these two timescales have been used to explain structural patterns in host-parasite networks, where the evolution of the manner in which species balance the use of their resources in interactions with each other was examined.One of these patterns was nestedness, in which the set of parasite species within a particular host forms a subset of those within a more species-rich host.

Trophic structure, stability, and parasite persistence threshold in food webs.

Food web structure of free-living species is an important determinant of parasite species richness. Downwardly asymmetric predator-prey interactions (where there are more prey than predator species) have been shown, both theoretically and empirically, to harbour more trophically transmitted parasite species than expected due to chance. Here, we demonstrate that this could be due to the increase in the basic reproductive ratio that the addition of non-host prey species to a system creates.

On the maintenance of bird song dialects.

Many bird species, especially song birds but also for instance some hummingbirds and parrots, have noted dialects. By this we mean that locally a particular song is sung by the majority of the birds, but that neighbouring patches may feature different song types. Behavioural ecologists have been interested in how such dialects come about and how they are maintained for over 45 years.

Analysis of a vector-bias model on malaria transmission.

We incorporate a vector-bias term into a malaria-transmission model to account for the greater attractiveness of infectious humans to mosquitoes in terms of differing probabilities that a mosquito arriving at a human at random picks that human depending on whether he is infectious or susceptible. We prove that transcritical bifurcation occurs at the basic reproductive ratio equalling 1 by projecting the flow onto the extended centre manifold. We next study the dynamics of the system when incubation time of malaria parasites in mosquitoes is included, and find that the longer incubation time reduces the prevalence of malaria.

Dynamic coexistence of sexual and asexual invasion fronts in a system of integro-difference equations.

The role of long-range dispersal in the coexistence of sexual and asexual relatives in a population of hermaphrodite flowering plants is investigated. In these populations, growth and reproduction often occur during a sedentary stage that is then followed by dispersal of propagules. These two stages are clearly distinguishable and show strong seasonality.

The persistence of parasitic plasmids.

The conditions under which plasmids are predicted to persist remain controversial. Here, we reevaluate the ordinary differential equations used previously to model plasmid persistence and conclude that the parameter space required for maintenance is far less stringent than has been supposed. Strikingly, our model demonstrates that purely parasitic plasmids may persist, even in the absence of heterogeneity in the host population, and that this persistence is expressed by oscillations or damped oscillations between the plasmid-bearing and the plasmid-free class.

The adaptiveness of defence strategies against cuckoo parasitism.

Host bird species of the Eurasian Cuckoo, Cuculus canorus, often display egg-discrimination behaviour but chick-rejection behaviour has never been reported. In this paper, we analyse a host-cuckoo association in which both population dynamics and evolutionary dynamics are explored in a discrete-time model. We introduce four host types, each with their own defence behaviour, displaying either egg or chick rejection, neither or both, We also introduce fitness functions for each of these host types.

Information flow, opinion polling and collective intelligence in house-hunting social insects.

The sharing and collective processing of information by certain insect societies is one of the reasons that they warrant the superlative epithet 'super-organisms' (Franks 1989, Am. Sci. 77, 138-145).

Coexistence of sexual and asexual conspecifics: a cellular automaton model.

Most previous models of populations mixed for reproductive mode have omitted important local interactions between sexual and asexual individuals. We propose a cellular automaton model where local rules focus on fertilization and colonization. This model produces rich sets of data which are then studied by means of spatial statistics.

Chimpanzees and the mathematics of battle.

Recent experiments have demonstrated the importance of numerical assessment in animal contests. Nevertheless, few attempts have been made to model explicitly the relationship between the relative number of combatants on each side and the costs and benefits of entering a contest. One framework that may be especially suitable for making such explicit predictions is Lanchester's theory of combat, which has proved useful for understanding combat strategies in humans and several species of ants.