Wading bird foraging on a wetland landscape: a comparison of two strategies.

Tactile-feeding wading birds, such as wood storks and white ibises, require high densities of prey such as small fishes and crayfish to support themselves and their offspring during the breeding season. Prey availability in wetlands is often determined by seasonal hydrologic pulsing, such as in the subtropical Everglades, where spatial distributions of prey can vary through time, becoming heterogeneously clumped in patches, such as ponds or sloughs, as the wetland dries out. In this mathematical modeling study, we selected two possible foraging strategies to examine how they impact total energetic intake over a time scale of one day.

Simple criteria for finding (nearly) optimal vaccination strategies.

Strategies for best controlling the spread of the diseases with limited vaccine available are explored. I use influenza as a representative disease in point. The model describes the dynamics of influenza spread among multiple groups that have different risks and activity levels.