Dr. Hoyt from Virginia Tech will present a talk about his work entitled, “Sit-and-Wait Pathogens: Environmental Pathogen Reservoirs and Infectious Disease Dynamics.”

The Abstract is as Follows:

Emerging infectious diseases are recognized as a serious threat to wildlife populations, and pathogen transmission is a fundamental component of disease systems governing the rate and extent of host impacts. Examining data across broad spatial and temporal time scales can help elucidate processes that lead to increases in host infections and subsequent population declines. Combining twelve years of data on host infection, environmental reservoir dynamics, and population trends we elucidate the contribution of environmental transmission to infectious disease dynamics for the emerging wildlife disease of bats, white-nose syndrome (WNS). We find that the environmental reservoir is a key factor influencing bat infection and impacts across local and global scales. In addition, the experimental removal of the pathogen causing WNS from the environment reduced bat infection and mortality. Finally, we examined contributions of pathogen virulence to landscape-level disease patterns using both empirical field sampling and experimental infections. We find both pathogen strain and host species were important factors that contributed to variation in prevalence of the pathogen that causes snake fungal disease. More broadly, our results highlight that determining the diverse processes that underlie patterns of pathogen transmission can serve as points of leverage for managing wildlife disease.