ArticleGlobal ecology and conservation2020
Changes in spatial organization following an acute epizootic: Tasmanian devils and their transmissible cancer.
Article in Global ecology and conservation, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Impacts of infectious diseases on movement metrics in a large carnivore: Highly pathogenic avian influenza, leptospirosis, and pumas.iScience · 2025Article
- The devil in more detail: Eco-evolutionary genomics of Tasmanian devil persistence despite range-wide spread of a fatal, transmissible cancer.PLoS pathogens · 2025Article
- Human habitat modification, not apex scavenger decline, drives isotopic niche variation in a carnivore community.Oecologia · 2024Article
- Variation between species, populations, groups and individuals in the fitness consequences of out-group conflict.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Quantifying 25 years of disease-caused declines in Tasmanian devil populations: host density drives spatial pathogen spread.Ecology letters · 2021Article
- Group density, disease, and season shape territory size and overlap of social carnivores.The Journal of animal ecology · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Epidemiological studies commonly monitor host population density but rarely account for how transmission dynamics might be influenced by changes in spatial and social organization that arise from high mortality altering population demography. Devil facial tumour disease (DFTD), a novel transmissible cancer, caused almost 100% mortality of its single host, the Tasmanian devil, and a >90% local population decline since its emergence 20 years ago. We compare size and overlap in home ranges in a devil population before and 15 years after disease outbreak. We used location data collected with VHF tracking collars in 2001 and GPS collars in the same area in 2015 and 2016. Density of adult devils, calculated from live trapping data in the same years, show a strong decrease following the disease outbreak. The decline in density was accompanied by a reduction in female home range size, a trend not observed for males. Both spatially explicit population modelling and animal tracking showed a decrease in female home range overlap following the DFTD outbreak. These changes in spatial organisation of the host population have the potential to alter the local transmission dynamic of the tumours. Our results are consistent with the general theory of sex-biased spatial organization mediated by resource availability and highlight the importance of incorporating spatial ecology into epidemiological studies.
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Registered trials
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