Abstract:
Spatial disease ecology is emerging as a new field that requires the integration of
complementary approaches to address how the distribution and movements of hosts and
parasites may condition the dynamics of their interactions. In this context, migration, the
seasonal movement of animals to different zones of their distribution, is assumed to play a
key role in the broad scale circulation of parasites and pathogens. Nevertheless, migration is
not the only type of host movement that can influence the spatial ecology, evolution and
epidemiology of infectious diseases. Dispersal, the movement of individuals between the
location where they were born or bred to a location where they breed, has attracted
attention as another important type of movement for the spatial dynamics of infectious
diseases. Host dispersal has notably been identified as a key factor for the evolution of hostparasite
interactions as it implies gene flow among local host populations and thus can alter
patterns of coevolution with infectious agents across spatial scales. However, not all
movements between host populations lead to dispersal per se. One type of host movement
that has been neglected, but that may also play a role in parasite spread is prospecting, i.e.
movements targeted at selecting and securing new habitat for future breeding. Prospecting
movements, which have been studied in detail in certain social species, could result in the dispersal of infectious agents among different host populations without necessarily involving
host dispersal. In this paper, we outline how these various types of host movements might
influence the circulation of infectious disease agents and discuss methodological approaches
that could be used to assess their importance. We specifically focus on examples from work
on colonial seabirds, ticks and tick-borne infectious agents. These are convenient biological
models because they are strongly spatially structured and involve relatively simple
communities of interacting species. Overall, this review emphasizes that explicit
consideration of the behavioral and population ecology of hosts and parasites is required to
disentangle the relative roles of different types of movement for the spread of infectious
diseases.
