Host competence, interspecific competition and vector preference interact to determine the vector-borne infection ecology

Abstract

Understanding how ecological interactions affect vector-borne disease dynamics is crucial in the context of rapid biodiversity loss and increased emerging vector-borne diseases. Although there have been many studies on the impact of interspecific competition and host competence on disease dynamics, few of them have addressed the case of a vector-borne disease. Using a simple compartment model with two competing host species and one vector, we investigated the combined effects of vector preference, host competence, and interspecific competition on disease risk in a vector-borne system. Our research demonstrated that disease transmission dynamics in multi-host communities are more complex than anticipated. Vector preference and differences in host competence shifted the direction of the effect of competition on community disease risk, yet interspecific competition quantitatively but not qualitatively changed the effect of vector preference on disease risk. Our work also identified the conditions of the dilution effect and amplification effect in frequency-dependent transmission mode, and we discovered that adding vector preference and interspecific competition into a simple two-host-one-vector model altered the outcomes of how increasing species richness affects disease risk. Our work explains some of the variation in outcomes in previous empirical and theoretical studies on the dilution effect.